Feed your skin

Sometimes, we need to feed more than our insides. Making recipes to nourish your body from the outside in can be as much fun as making meals that nourish from the inside out!

Today I made my first batch of organic calendula cream. It's quite easy and very rewarding to make botanical preparations for your skin using a variety of skin-loving herbs and ingredients.

The cream I made today is an anti-inflammatory soothing cream for the body and face. It's made on a base of calendula (Calendula officinalis) oil and infused with soothing chickweed (Stellaria media), astringent witchhazel (Hamamelis virginiana) and lavender (Lavendula officinale) essential oil to create a super moisturising and soothing cream for rashes, acne, rosacea, and insect bites.

It's such a good feeling to DIY beautiful yummy body goodies that I thought I would share the recipe. I think the process of making the cream is just as soothing as the finished product.

From top left: the ingredients for the cream; squeezing the infused oil from the plant using muslin cloth; combining the ingredients for (left) the oil-wax mixture and (right) the liquid ingredients; the finished product!

Making herb-infused oils

Infusing plants in oil is an age old method of extracting the active constiuents from plants that elicit their healing properties on us, and putting them into a usable form i.e. the oil. For this you will need some dried herbs and a good quality oil, such as extra virgin olive, almond, or jojoba. I used olive for its stability (it rarely goes rancid), plus it's more affordable than say jojoba oil which, while absolutely luscious, comes with a hefty price tag.

The herbs you use depend on what you'd like your cream to be for. Calendula is a remarkably soothing, wound-healing, anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and anti-fungal flower making it a perfect base for my skin-nourishing cream.

You could also infuse lavender, St John's Wort, comfrey or arnica for their respective healing properties.

Half fill a clean jar with dried herb, then cover the herb with your oil of choice. Screw a lid onto it tightly and leave the jar to steep in a cool, dark place for 3-4 weeks. The exception to this is St. John's Wort, which is best infused in oil when left in a warm place that receives direct sunlight for part of the day.

and then, there was calendula-infused oil!

Basic cream recipe

Now the fun begins. After you've let your herb's goodies infuse into the oil, you can use it for the greater good! You'll need to separate the plant material from the oil using muslin cloth and squeezing the remainder into a new container. Get rid of the plant matter. You now have an infused oil ready to be used as part of a cream!

Ingredients

30g emulsifying wax
50mL herb-infused oil
24mL vegetable glycerine
10mL herbal tincture (I used 5mL each of chickweed and witchhazel)
90mL distilled water
40 drops lavender essential oil

Procedure

1. Heat the wax and oil over a water bath to combine.
2. Warm the herbal extract, water and glycerine also over a water bath at the same temperature as the oil-wax mixture. This helps to avoid cracking which occurs when a too-cold liquid is added to the warm oil-wax mixture.
3. Slowly add the liquid mix (herbal extract, water & glycerine) to the oil-wax mixture, stirring to maintain the emulsion until set.
4. Add your essential oil of choice. I used lavender for its beautiful smell and natural preservation properties.
   
5. Spoon or pour the mixture into amber glass jars, pop the lids on and let cool. Voila you've made your own phyto-therapeutic body care product!

Have fun and let me know how you go with your own skin food recipes!

Love,
Casey