At Mabel we take pride in making our own lip balms, soaps, lotions and a slew of other family skin care products.  Click here to see our new one hour DVD video on how to make bath products that is guaranteed fun for the whole family.  This DVD video is the best work we have ever completed.  In fact, it has been a few years since we bought soap or balm from the store.  We find making our own products is actually more affordable than store bought and allows for much more quality control.  Making your own products also lends itself to a great sense of self accomplishment.  We try to offer all the supplies you would need in our supply store and we strive to keep them economical so all of our friends and family can benefit. To the right is our new Melt and Pour Soaps Book!  We are almost done editing The Bathroom Chemist DVD as a compliment to our very popular Bathroom Chemist book sold below.  Our fun "How to Make Gift Baskets" DVD is done, click here for details.

At Mabel, we use all natural melt and pour bases for most everything we do, including balm, soy candles, lotions and more.  Many products are simply melt in the microwave or hand blender easy.  Whether it is soap, lotion, lip balm or candles, the words "double boiler" or "stir for an hour" are just not heard in our kitchens.  In fact, they are forbidden.  

Fragrance Oils 

All of our fragrance oils are delivered in beautiful glass apothecary bottles with silver screw caps.   They come in 2 ounce, 8 ounce and 16 ounce.  When you order 4 ounces, we simply upgrade you to an 8 ounce bottle.  Completely reusable and a beautiful enhancement to any room.  We do not charge extra for this and we label them lightly so they are easy to peel off.  Our fragrance oils are the finest and are formulated for bath as well as candle products.   They are so potent, they can be cut 100% with a carrier oil for resale and well still stay strong.  If you can find a stronger fragrance on the web, we will buy it for you!  Start collecting your bottles today!  May we recommend  "McIntosh Apple" mixed with  "Grass" or Simply "Cotton" for very crisp and clean scents.  Click here to see our newest edition of The Bathroom Chemist.  If you want to know about water based fragrance versus oil based please click here for an article just about that.  

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Making your own products is also a great family activity.  It is one of the few platforms that adults as well as kids can truly all be interested in the same activity and develop creative skills applicable to a lifetime.  If you are just getting started, here is what we suggest as easiest to learn on down:

Lip Balm

Making your own lip balm takes only seconds, and lends itself to making your own solid perfume and healing balms--such as Tiger Balm.  Once you understand the simple chemistry of balm making, you are then learning the bases for lotions and soaps.  In making lip balm you also find how to make lip gloss, even if it is just using all Vitamin e oil in one of our gloss rollers.  Add a little flavor oil and you have the healthiest lip gloss on the planet!  We should know, that is all we gloss our lips with!  Join our e-mail list and get our wonderful Balm Recipe e-BOOK FREE!  In fact we like lip balm so much, we also own lipbalmsupplies.com as of 2003.  Former lip balm articles:   Vita-Balm  Our ebook The Bathroom Chemist and The Self Apothecary are great and contain all of these recipes.  The descriptions are on Amazon, but can be purchased here at this link more affordably.

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Melt and Pour Soap Making

Just one fabulous example of the original ideas in our Melt and Pour Soaps Book is the Farmhouse Kitchen Deodorizing Bar on the right.  Between the scent of vanilla and coffee grounds, the smell of onions and/or garlic on your hands do not stand a chance!  These bars are so beautiful it would appear you paid $10 each for them or more.  We sell the Farmhouse mold, as well as the supplies to make these bars in our supply room. There are so many recipes you can run with, when making your own melt and pour soap, it is truly amazing.  We are partial to the honey bee soap and calamine soap for kids with itchy skin.  Again, the description of our ebook is best on Amazon, but can be purchased more affordably in our ebook store.  

So with The Bathroom Chemist, The Self Apothecary, and Melt and Pour Soaps, we learn how to make basic soap, bath bombs and our very own shampoo, comes; shampoo bars, lotion bars, and then a year behind it their sophisticated sisters;  gem soaps, bath melts (related to lotion bars and bath bombs) shimmering lotion bars that look like opals (YES!), bubble bars (related to bath bombs and the bubble theory), shimmering bath salts, nouveau deodorant and bath bombs that would even paralyze the bold Salvador Dali in color choice! Bottom line?  If you can ever master this new stuff, you will never want to leave the bathroom again!  The bath bomb to the left is deliciously feisty, zesty Lush fruit bowl of a soap makes a welcome return to the soap shelves, bursting with kiwis and refreshing essential oils. It also includes juniper berry oil which is said to stimulate the body when you’re feeling drowsy. At Mabel we are big advocates of using natural color when at all possible, please click here for our natural coloration ideas chart.   Click here to see our new The Self Apothecary.

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Making Your Own Beads Oil Beads

This is truly a Mabel idea but the beads should be used within a few weeks because they do eventually break down.  I would even package each one in its own plastic bag and label all of its benefits of the bath oil recipe.   Please click here on a former article on how to make these beads with empty gel caps.

Cold Process Soap Making

After mastering lip balms, melt and pour soaps, bath bombs and the other toiletries, making cold process soap is probably the biggest challenge of all, but well worth learning.  There are just some types of soap you cannot achieve with melt and pour.  If you are interested in the cold process method please consider our new The Natural Soapmaker ebook with great recipes and instructions dedicated only to the cold process method.  We make cold process soaps about four times a year at Mabel.  They do take a good month to cure, so we make 40 or so at a time.  Again, the descriptions of our ebooks are best on Amazon, but can more affordably purchased in our ebook store.

The techniques employed in the new migration of skin care products are basic combinations of the basic theories we already mastered, such as bath bombs--but mixed with lotion bar recipe constituents. Add to that a serious play on "aromatherapy" where a mind can truly run wild, in pre-planned "bursts"  of scent, matched with an outstanding color contrast and more attention truly paid to  classical or very unusual shapes.  This is where chemistry leaves off and aesthetic contribution begins.  Total Coolness!  We call the soap bar to the left "Picasso Soap Bar" and this  piece is scented with bursts of Kiwi, Ylang Ylang, Myrrh, Juniper, Gardenia, and Bergamot oils.  The "Picasso" technique can be also employed in lotion bars, deodorant bars (as shown below), shampoo bars, and what not, but we recommend you keep the shapes distinct to your line so you know what is what.  To obtain splashes of color we use colored and scented wax bursts, (as seen in the deodorant bar below) and already made chunks of like items, with the base poured cool enough as not to melt the bursts of color or evaporate the scent. These recipes and techniques can be found in our Melt and Pour Soap Book.

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The secret in the making of gem soap includes mixing thin traces of white oil based soap (like coconut) with a main base of bright layers of water based glycerin and cutting in a rough and rustic manner.  Guys like to do that part!  It is a competence thing.  If you want to keep on speaking terms include him under the "damsel in distress routine" and make the request simple, like "can you help me get this out."  If the request is to hard, your plan will back fire and they will depart agitated.   Men inevitably act reluctant to participate in "girl stuff" but soon have thoughts to take over your entire operation.  Back to design and concept, the cold process soap ladies have even replaced water with juices such as carrot and tomato when preparing the lye solution to achieve some interesting colors and results.  They are now using certain crayons for pigment, as they found a little melted wax an element of good soap making.  In cold process soap making the wax is usually a little melted beeswax, and now soap makers are using colored beeswax to grab another edge on normally hard to maintain color in this non-melt and pour method.  We recently broke the rules by using a little melted SoyWax™ now (with great success and offers wonderful economy) to replace some of the beeswax requested in items such as soap, both melt n pour and cold process, lip balms, body lotions/bars.  These ideas are expressed in our newest book "The Natural Soap Maker."

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Packaging:

This is a challenge but doable.  You can theoretically pour your soap or lotion bar preparations into a wooden box, already divided and simply let it cure and dry in the permanent type mold.  The Mabel White Company will try to offer these boxes soon.  Removal of the final product by the recipient is pretty easy as it does cure it shrinks a tad.  

We find many products such as dry bath milks, can be packaged in envelopes and labels.  Someone took the challenge out of packaging a bath bomb and used a small shrink wrap bag (left) and stuck a silk flower petal in the middle of the shrink tepee.  We consider that ingenious.  We like to use plastic pet bottles in the bath, glass will inevitably get broken--even by guests.  

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