Upcoming chemistry experiments in the kitchen.

I received two very large Garden of Wisdom orders last week (one of them took almost 3 weeks to arrive):

I wasn't able to fit both orders in the photo so this isn't even everything!

You can probably tell that there are fewer finished products and mostly raw ingredients in these orders. I'm delving into MIY because I got annoyed at the decrease in quality in a hair conditioner that I recently re-ordered. Jessicurl's Weekly Deep Conditioning Treatment now has a noticeably whiter color and thinner texture, which suggests to me that the company is now skimping on the cocoa or shea butter.

Garden of Wisdom only sells the unrefined, non-deodorized cocoa butter in 15 oz batches, so I was wondering what I was going to do with the rest of it. Then I remembered that many pregnancy stretch mark creams are high in cocoa butter and my sister (who will give birth to my first nephew any minute now) and a friend (who is trying to get pregnant) might find one useful. So I added some other oils that reputed to be good for stretch marks (rose hip oil, wheat germ oil) to that order.

After that first ingredients order was placed, I did a lot of reading on the Soap Dish Forum to find recipes for whipped butters and found out that adding 2% beeswax to whipped butters helps to prevent them from melting into a pool of oil during the summer. But what to do with the rest of the beeswax? Well, the Soap Dish Forum had an answer for that too: lip balm! I'm addicted to lip balms and my favourite lip balm (Dr. Hauschka Lip Care Stick) is kind of expensive. So after checking out recipes on the Soap Dish Forum, I added some of the more popular ingredients for lip balms to my second ingredients order (babassu oil, palm kernel oil) along with the beeswax.

And finally Kristen told me here how easy it was to make my own cleansing oil. She uses PEG-7 olivate (which makes it easier to wash off the oils with water), while some recipes on the Soap Dish Forum call for Cromollient SCE for the same purpose. Of course, those (along with castor oil) went into the cart too. I also threw in some more humectants for my hair conditioner and some Polowax in case I ever decide to try making my own emulsified face and body creams (though I have so many from GoW, Villainess and propaganda that it's not likely).

My Cuisinart hand mixer arrived on Saturday and I was going to try my hand at making this stuff on Sunday but one of my cats was sick. He's much better today, so I might try making the whipped cocoa butter tomorrow night.