Simple Handscrub & Lotion Bars

Simple Handscrub

This is the kind of gift that a small child can make, and actually they’d probably love the feeling of squishing the oil and other ingredients together. We used organic ingredients because we’d rather use them where we have the option.

Ingredients

• 250g Raw Organic Coconut Oil
• 200g Organic Sugar
• 50g Coarse Organic Sea Salt (I like using Oriel Sea Salt, a local producer)
• 1 Organic Vanilla Pod

Method

Into a large bowl, weigh out the coconut oil, sugar and sea salt. Split the vanilla pod down the middle and using the flat end of the knife, scrape out the seeds into the bowl.

Take a fork and mix all the ingredients together until well combined and/or wearing rubber gloves, squish everything together into a paste. Decant into 1 large tub or smaller jars. 500g of this scrub should do quite a number of hand scrubs!

Body & Bathing Lotion Bars

These are fantastic. You can see a couple of them have pink glitter in them. We were experimenting and used some edible pink glitter in the end of the mixture. Something we won’t do again. Pink glitter aside, the lotion bars are made using just 3 ingredients.

They are very stable in cool temperatures but don’t leave them by the radiator! To use in the bath, pop 1 into a mug of boiling water and stir until dissolved, then pour the mixture into a bath with hot running water. To use as a body lotion, hold in your hands for a couple of minutes until the oils start to release and simply rub in. I use small silicone moulds to make these little bars. The circular bars are about the size of a €2 coin in diameter and twice as thick. You can certainly make this mixture in bigger bars though. Silicone moulds are the way to go here.

Just to note on the beeswax options. You can pick up organic beeswax from your local certified beekeeper (let me know if you find somebody locally as I’ve found organic beeswax hard to source), you can buy it online in bar form or if happen to have a suitable hive source you can use the raw beeswax from there providing you don’t need it later on in the year. I couldn’t find a suitable source locally so used bars that I bought online.

Ingredients

200g Raw Organic Coconut Oil

100g Organic Beeswax

1 Organic Vanilla Pod

Method

Fill a large saucepan partway with hot water. Put this on a low heat then sit a glass bowl on top of the saucepan, ensuring that the bottom doesn’t touch the water below (if it does then pour some water out). Put the coconut oil and beeswax into the glass bowl and allow to dissolve into oil. The beeswax takes longer than the coconut oil and this does take a while. Don’t worry!

Once the wax and oil have melted together, cut the vanilla pod lengthways, scrape out the seeds using the flat side of the knife and stir them into the oil mixture. Allow to infuse for 2 minutes before carefully pouring the liquid oil CAUTION HOT into silicone moulds. Cooling time depends on the size of your silicone moulds. Mine were small and only took 2 hours. If you use larger cupcake sized moulds then expect to allow about 12 hours or overnight cooling before you pop them out.

Store the bars in a cool, dry spot, away from direct sunlight.

This is a quick reminder that this recipe is Day 12 of ‘Christmas with Caitríona’ which is a 24 day series of Christmas content across my blog/YouTube channel etc aimed at saving you time and money in the run up to Christmas. I hope you like it and if so please do share the tips and tricks with your friends and family. Cxxx