Read an Excerpt
I have no idea why anyone would buy lotion. It's a mystery.
Maybe it's because of another mystery: the lotions themselves. With even halfway decent lotions so expensive, they must somehow be hard to make, right?
Not really. If we all knew how easy it was to make our own lotion, the stores could clear a lot of shelf space. Who would buy what they could make better, and at a tenth of the cost?
The thing is, few people believe that lotionmaking could be easy—not before they've tried it, that is.
It seems like it would have to be hard. It's hard to even read the ingredients, when you look at consumer labels. By the time you've plowed through methylparaben, triethanolamine, butylene glycol, glycol stearate, glyceryl stearate, disodium EDTA, aluminum magnesium silicate, DMDM hydantoin, and tocopheryl acetate, you're just about ready to give up—and if that doesn't do it, you'll definitely throw up your hands at 3-iodo-2-propynylbutylarbamate. You wouldn't know where to get that stuff, much less what to do with it once you did.
"Honey, I'm running to the store for DMDM hydantoin and 3-iodo-2-propynylbutylcarbamate. Anything you need while I'm out?"
But, whatever manufacturers do to make bottles of lotion by the millions, handcraft lotionmaking is much simpler. It's a lot like making salad dressing. Of course, if you make lotion to sell, it will be regulated by law, just like food in a restaurant—but making it for your own use is like cooking at home. You'll work clean, as you would for cooking, but you won't be held to commercial standards.
I'll show you how to make lotion for yourself in a way that's clean enough—and how to check if that causes any problem. It isn't likely to. I've made lotion for myself for years, and never had any go bad.
In some cases, you should sanitize more thoroughly. So, this book will give two different methods for making lotion. Personal Technique is for simple lotion meant for your own use. This one is quicker and easier. Pro Technique is for lotion you mean to sell, or for lotion with perishable ingredients like milk, or for lotion with no preservative. This one isn't difficult either—just more painstaking and precise.
But why the difference? After all, you wouldn't want something insanitary for your own use. Why wouldn't you follow the same procedure for any lotion?
The answer is that Pro Technique is designed to conform to common laws and regulations for commercial lotionmaking. These laws and regulations have to address almost anything that can happen. They have to prevent the sale of lotion made in filthy conditions by people who have no idea what they're doing. They have to apply the same way to everyone. And with all that, they're simply more than you need for most home use.
Still, the difference between the techniques isn't huge. And whichever you try, you'll soon be making lotion better than you're likely to find at any price.
