Lavender 'Perfume'

A lovely young lady (who happens to be the daughter of a steady client) put in a request for her own personal lavender perfume not very long ago.

When I say young, I do mean quite young. Her age hasn’t reached ‘double digits’ yet. Formulating a ‘perfume’ for someone under 10 years of age takes a little thought.

The young lady loves the scent of lavender, and even though lavender essential oil is quite well tolerated, it is still a very concentrated ingredient. One might be tempted to use a hydrosol/hydrolate, but lavender hydrosol just doesn’t have the same scent as the essential oil.

After careful deliberation, the ‘perfume’ was duly formulated to be extremely mild and skin friendly, yet offer the fresh scent of lavender she loves. The look on her face was a clear indication the brief had been met.

Make Something Fabulous

There is a thriving community of artisan cosmetics makers who are also handcrafting and using their own extracts in both skin and haircare products. With the many possibilities botanical ingredients offer along with the range of solvents to choose from, it’s no wonder the age old practices of capturing the power of plants are seeing a renewed interest with the green beauty revolution generation.

Instagram seems to be the place to be for sharing creative ideas and products of this type – the inspiration is positively addictive! If you’re on Instagram and making extracts for your cosmetics, please feel free to tag me (@lisaliseskincare) and show me what you’re working on!

Thank you for sharing the passion!

Are you curious to know a bit more about making extracts? Visit the shop and have a browse around for e-books that will show you how to get started making your own.

Do Essential Oils and Honey Mix?

As I have been knee deep in formulating specifically with essential oils since the end of last year, and am addicted to making infusions of all types, this was a question that popped into existence all by itself one day: testing whether infusing honey with essential oils was at all possible.

Pictured above: the first attempt. A ‘dollop’ of raw honey was ‘introduced’ to bit of essential oil (I’d have to check my notes for exact amounts, but speaking from memory, it was 2/3 honey to 1/3 oil). The little cup you see above was the test vessel. After adding the essential oils, it was covered with a cling-type film and left to stand at room temperature.

Within 48 hours there was visible result. Find the rest of this story on the main blog.

Piri Piri Chili Balm

This is a balm with piri piri chili - created specifically for the purpose of testing whether or not it can relieve pain. Capsaicin (the active ingredient in chilis) is showing some impressive pain-relieving results in scientific tests, and that was enough to get me curious about trying out if it were possible to create a soothing balm using chili-infused oil as one of the ingredients.

Piri piri chili is one of many chilis I am working with at the moment, and the scoville units in the LisaLise lab have been off the charts high, but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.

If you want to read the initial feedback from my tester group using this balm, please visit the main blog right here.

Playing With Clay

Pictured: illite clay in 2 colors. It is quite common to confuse the different types of cosmetics clays, and it’s quite understandable. Clays are not always correctly labelled and even a distributor can be (unintentionally) misinformed by a supplier.

After a fair bit of research and digging, I’ve procured some real Brazilian clay and will be adding it to the collection on this mini-guide to cosmetic clays. as soon as I finish testing (read: playing around with) it.

Meantime, there will be quite a bit of clay playing going on at the Essential Formulation course I am currently teaching at Tisserand Institute. Creating facial masks is lesson 7 and I am looking forward to it immensely.

Let the clay begin!

A Small Bath Lotion Series

This is a bath lotion with essential oils created especially for the Essential Formulation course I am currently teaching at Tisserand Institute.

Developing products that can safely and effectively disperse oils into water is both challenging and fun - especially when the brief includes a preference of using easy-to-source, everyday ingredients.

This formula fills that bill and has performed so well I couldn’t help making a little series of them to give to family and friends who happen to have bathtubs. To a person living in North America, that may sound a bit odd but in Denmark it is more common to install a shower than a bathtub in dwellings of all kinds.

But even though bathtub products have a much smaller audience in the Nordic region, it is still possible to enjoy bath-related products in homes that ‘only’ have showers (think foot soak).