Homemade hand & body cream

Bottles, dispensers, tubes, screw-top jars.  You know how things accumulate?  We thought we were pretty good about running a tight ship and not having lots of excess toiletries.  But when it came to lotions and creams, we had ... lots.  Of course, we didn't buy more and throughout the course of this year one by one the various containers ran dry.

Well, a few weeks ago we finally ran out of lotion / cream.  Time to make our own.

Starting with this link, I devised the following recipe:

1/4 cup coconut oil

1/8 cup shea butter

1/8 cup cocoa butter

1 tbsp liquid aloe vera

1 tbsp sweet almond oil

2 drops clary sage essential oil

2 drops sandalwood essential oil

1 drop patchouli essential oil

1 drop neroli (15%) essential oil

Heat the first three ingredients together -- I used a makeshift double boiler (a bowl sitting an inch-and-a-half-deep in a pot of water on the stovetop.  Add the rest and blend well -- I used a Magic Bullet.  In hindsight, I'd have waited and added the essential oils after this step since we now have a Magic Bullet container that smells like this recipe.  But hey ho.  Once done, I put it in a re-sourced lotion container and popped it in the fridge for a while to get it to "set".

The stuff is great.  For the scent portion, my aim was to make something that was fairly gender-neutral (Erin's the main consumer of this type of thing in our little household, but we'd just finished moving apartments, I'd spent several hours cleaning, cleaning, and cleaning, and my hands needed something).  I think I pulled it off -- we both like it.

Enjoy!