Homemade with Love
Make Your Own Holiday Gifts for Friends and Loved Ones.
By Karin Seabert Olsen BA LMP
It’s so nice to hand your friend or loved one a gift that you made yourself. Combine high quality ingredients with your special touch to let them know that YOU made this wonderful gift with love and intention. There is a whole world of gifts that can be made for the holidays. In the body and skin care realms there are: Soap, Lip balms, bath fizzies, bath salts, sugar and salt scrubs, foot balms, healing salves as well as massage lotions and oils. You can make a healing salve to help a wound heal or a foot cream to keep feet healthy. In the natural health realm you can make tinctures, syrups, and medicinal chocolates. Here we will focus on skin and body care treats for your body and soul.
Use Recipes to Start
All of these products make wonderful gifts and are pleasurable to make as well. Refer to reliable books that have great recipes for homemade body and skincare gifts. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel until you have a sense of what you want from the products you make. Use someone else’s recipe before you start experimenting. Then make changes and test new ways of creating the perfect lip balm, for example. Small batches are best to start. You would be surprised how little it takes to fill 25 lip balm tubes!
Feed Your Body
When thinking about skin, and body care ingredients, I like to think about them in terms of what are you willing to put in your mouth? Your skin is one of the biggest organs of your body and if you slather something all over yourself you should realize that your body is absorbing many of its constituents. For example, cocoa butter is used to make one of our favorite foods- chocolate. Our body will respond with fewer allergic reactions if we are putting things on it that can be recognized as food.
Preservatives
If you are thinking about the things that go on your body as food I think it’s easy to conclude that preservatives are not always necessary. You can add something like Vitamin E for preservative effect but often Vitamin E is a synthetically created, not a natural ingredient as one might assume. Radiance does carry a natural Vitamin E in a dropper bottle.
All essential oils have anti-bacterial quality to them. They can help prevent the growth of bacteria and therefore act as a preservative without the harmful results of some synthetic preservatives, such as parabens. Be conscientious about choosing your essential oils. Organic essential oils are critical for anything you put on your body. Soap is about the only skincare product where you can use a lower grade essential oil because in the process of soap being made the essential oils are degraded. Using a clean work environment with sterilized equipment and containers is important to limit contamination.
Here is a short description of some of the ingredients that Radiance carries in bulk:
- Jojoba Oil- (Organic) thick oil, absorbs easily & prevents dry skin, very luxurious.
- Almond Oil- (Non-GMO) medium oil, excellent emollient.
- Grapeseed Oil- (Cold Pressed) light oil, moisturizing, absorbs quickly.
- Palm Fruit Oil- (Organic) thick paste at room temperature. Rich, creamy with a dark red color.
- Shea Butter- (Fair trade) butter texture at room temperature, moisturizing, sun protective.
- Cocoa Butter- (Organic & Fair Trade) solid at room temperature, helps strengthen skin.
- Beeswax- (Local) solid at room temperature and quite hard. Great for creating a harder lip balm for tubes.
- Essential Oils- (Organic, Eco-Cert, & Wild Crafted) great for their scent as well as their chemical attributes. For example- Lavender is relaxing and a natural anti-depressant.
- Herbs in Bulk- Organic or Wildcrafted) for making infusions, the base for many skin and body care products. Think lavender, calendula, rose…
Packaging
Use pretty, unusually shaped bottles with handmade labels on your homemade creations. List ingredients if you can so folks know that you used whole, organic, fair trade, ingredients. Use something recyclable like raffia or cotton ribbon for accents on your finished item. You can color designs on blank stickers for each product you make. Tying a recycled paper label onto the jar with raffia also lets the container be reused more easily and gives lots of space for descriptions and for ingredients. Wrapping your gift in cotton fabric that can be reused is a unique gift presentation.
In the end you have had an opportunity to work with natural ingredients to create lovely gifts for your friends and family with love and intention. It’s fun for you to create and fun to receive!
