More DIY Bath and Body Recipes!

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com DIY: Not only is it cheaper, it's cleaner. Why spend loads of money on products with long lists of unbeautiful ingredients you likely can't pronounce? Especially since those chemicals often end up doing the opposite of what you want them to do, drying things up. Get the best ingredients by mixing them yourself. And plus, there's a lot of leeway here to play around with different oil bases and organic essential oils. Consider this recipe as a launch pad into the world of do-it-yourself body oils for a smooth and supple you.

ACNE TREATMENT

For minor acne flare ups, look to honey for help!
1/2 cup warm water
1/4 teaspoon salt
Pure honey

1. Mix together warm water and salt and stir well until salt dissolves. Apply a cotton ball soaked in the solution directly to blemish and maintain pressure with cotton ball for several minutes.
2. To use: Use a cotton swab to dab pure honey on blemish. Leave honey on for 10 minutes and rinse well with warm water. Honey also makes an excellent weekly facial mask; simply spread on your face and leave on for 20 minutes.

Body Oil for Dry Skin

Your skin will look healthy with better results than with lotions or creams. In fact, body oils added to a luxurious bath and/or applied to the skin, just after bathing (and towel drying), can be rubbed in flawlessly for a nourishing and moisturizing effect that is anything but greasy.
2 fl. oz. jojoba oil
2 fl. oz. almond oil
2 tablespoons of vitamin E oil
10 drops sweet orange oil
6 drops lavender essential oil
4 drops lemongrass essential oil

Add all of the ingredients into a glass jar or plastic bottle and shake. Its that easy!This also is superb after shaving!

Simple Brown Sugar Body Scrub

So sublimely sweet you'll want to rub it all over your body. And by all means, please do! This brown sugar body scrub and polish creates a sumptuous take-the-spa-home experience.
1/2 cup Organic Brown Sugar
1 Tbsp. Honey
1 Tbsp. Jojoba, Coconut or Almond Oil
1/4 tsp. Fresh Lemon Juice

In a large bowl, begin by lightly stirring your sugar and oil together, just until combined. Next, add the honey and lightly stir again. Lastly, pour your lemon juice in and mix it all up until you're happy with the consistency. And that's it! Store in a mason jar. Makes a budget friendly gift!
Well, that's it for now. Will be adding more soon!

~Gypsy

Incense Making Basics

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Most of the time when we think of incense or oils what comes to mind is the packaged stick stuff or the thick purple perfume knock off at the gas station or the dollar store or where ever. But real incenses are more complex, but many aren't hard to make at all! They are spirit lifting and the best ones are NOT mass produced. Surprising to most, they are so very easy to make! So, before I go off babbling about my favorite subject, let us dive into the tools that you should have on hand, shall we?

For Incense you will need:

mortar & pestle (to finely powder herbs)
coffee grinder ( is optional, most purists dont use them, but for me, they help with the rougher woods)
a bowel or 2 (to hold ingredients)
spoons/measuring cup/scale (so you can properly measure out how much of what went in where)
incense burner (a non metal or plastic bowl to place ash or sand in)
sand or ash (to place the bamboo coal on once lit)
tweezers (to hold the coal so it can be lit and placed on the ash or sand)
incense ingredients (woods, resins, flowers, essential oils, etc.)
bamboo charcoal (contains non of the stinky or harmful salt peter (sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate)
a notebook ( to record your recipes, amounts, successes and failures)

This is the way that you would make a 'non-combustible' incense. That means that it does not light on its own, therefor it does not contain harmful additions such as sodium nitrate or potassium nitrate. The very first incense that you should undertake should be a simple one. Maybe you have a favorite woodsy smell, maybe pine or sandalwood. Or maybe you favor more spicy scents such as cumin or cardamon. Either way there are more incense recipes in books and on the web than you can shake a stick at! So, here is the one secret to creating a no fail incense...every incense should have at least one resin or wood in each recipe.

If you are just starting out making incense mixtures then you should keep the number of ingredients down to three to begin with, perhaps one wood and two herbs, or one resin, one wood and one herb, etc. As you get used to making incense you can slowly expand the number of ingredients you use. Resins, often, will make a mess of your mortar and pestle and its best freeze them to get them powdered. I save them for grinding last, because you can grind and powder everything before you have to clean the mortar and pestle. You can weigh or measure each ingredient in our recipe after grinding, then keep one bowl for all our dry ingredients and another for all our resins.
Mix all your dry ingredients together first (herbs & woods), separately mix all your resins together then add your resins mixture to your dry mixture and mix together thoroughly. We like to throw the completed mixture into our mortar and pestle again and grind it all together one last time to help blend the aroma of each ingredient into the others. At this time, if you were planning on using any essential oils, now's the time.

You did it! See, I told you it wasn't all that hard, pretty easy right!?

~Gypsy


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Herbal Baths

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Sometimes we have just plain old shitty days. Some days we are so over worked, stressed out, and beat up all we can think about is just getting in the tub and letting all of our problems just evaporate with the steam of a hot bath.

Sometime a hot soak can really hit the spot. Other times, you dry off feeling unsatisfied. Well I thought I would share a few fabulous herbal bath ideas with you that you would absolutely love if you could hold out just a few minutes to gather some ingredients and I promise you will leave your bath rejuvenated, satisfied, and relaxed.

Lets start with the easiest to prepare. A Milk Bath.  Did you know a milk bath was the favorite of Cleopatra? Ok, here's what you need, about 2 to 4 cups of milk. Voila! The extras are... and this totally depends on your skin type. If you have oily skin, use a low fat milk. If you have dry skin, use whole milk. Add warm water to the tub, add the milk and enjoy.
Now, if you want to take this to the next level, add a few drops of your favorite essential oil if you have some, add a little honey, which is GREAT for your skin or you can add some oatmeal to a muslin bag or some cheese cloth and make a bundle and use that to exfoliate and scrub away your stress!
(Ok, so if you are like me and have bags of powdered milk somewhere in the back of the cabinet and you have no earthly idea what your gonna do with it, Milk Bath!!! And you dont have to worry about if the kids are gonna have enough milk for their cereal!)

Here's another really easy one to prepare. Buy some Epsom Salts, some Sea Salt and add a few herbs to some cheese cloth or muslin, tie it off and let it sit under the running water. Sounds pretty easy, huh?

So let us now talk about taking this whole bath thing to a whole new level. Bath Teas. If you have never heard of this or you have and you always wanted to try it, Im gonna show you how to do it really easy.
First, NEVER throw away orange, lemon or lime rinds! You can chop them up, let them dry and add them to your bath teas. Whenever possible try to find some organic rose petals, or lavender. They are great additions to bath teas and to the de-stressing factor.  I say to try to find organic, so that way you know that no harmful pesticides have been sprayed on them.
Try to mix and match some flowers and herbs to find a blend that you love. I personally love the smell of sweet basil. When I cook, I grab a pinch and rub it between my hands and add it to whatever Im cooking. I love the smell on my hands, so I will often add it to a bath tea or a tub tea as they are sometimes called.

I hope that I have given you a few ideas, and really you can take it and run with it. Enjoy!

~Gypsy