As I mentioned in my body butter post, I was planning to make a home-made moisturising cream. Because the body butter is nice, but it's purely fat-based, and I wanted something with water in it as well.

So I ordered my glycerine and emulsifying wax, and had a root through the various recipes I'd accumulated over the last 10 years (yes, that really is how long it's taken me to get to this) and settled on this one I'd found recently:

http://www.herbal-howto-guide.com/creams-and-lotions.html^archived

Distilled water is not so ubiquitous here in the UK for some reason, and certainly not so cheap. So instead of the cold infusion recommended in the recipe, I just made regular old bush tea (rooibos) the old fashioned way (with boiling water) and left it to steep for a few hours (that part was unplanned. I just couldn't get a free hob on the cooker for ages). Also, the recipe above doesn't use glycerine, but I wanted to include it for its humectant properties.

As you can see, the bush tea gave it a really lovely golden hue.

So here is what I used (I wasn't too exact with the solid ingredients):

• 3/4 tbsp organic, cold pressed virgin coconut oil
• 1/4 tbsp organic cocoa butter
• 1 tbsp emulsifying wax

• 1 tbsp cold-pressed virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp vegetable glycerine (add this at the same time as the liquid oil)

• 6 tbsp strong bush tea

• 5 drops Citricidal Grapefruit seed extract (GSE)
• 2 drops lavender essential oil
• 4 drops geranium essential oil
• 4 drops mandarin essential oil

Please read the note here!

The method is that described in the link above. There are also step by step instructions here:
http://www.herbal-howto-guide.com/lotion-recipes.html^archived
(Being a visual learner, I preferred the one with pictures!)

And here's my final cream:

There's that rich orangey hue. Very pretty! I keep it in a sterilised baby food jar (it does in fact look a lot like banana custard) in the fridge. The geranium overpowered the other scents this time. I was originally not going to use any essential oil at all, because I know that the same oils should not be used continuously, but while looking for recipes, there was a lot of scare-mongering from the pro-synthetic chemical brigade on how if you don't use preservatives, you'll poison yourself from all the mould that will grow on your cream etc and Citricidal is NOT A PRESERVATIVE ZOMG! so I thought I would play it safe just in case there was something in it and supplement the GSE with some essential oil to prolong the shelf life. So I keep the main batch in the fridge and I decanted a small amount into another jar to keep in my room.

Here is an argument against GSE:
http://swiftcraftymonkey.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/preservatives-grapefruit-seed-extract.html

Here is a good website that helped set my mind at rest re: preservatives.
http://lotionsecrets.com/preservativechart.html

My cream is for my own use only. So make up your own mind. I'd rather have to throw out a jar of mouldy cream than slowly poison myself with parabens and formaldehyde. So there you are. I'll write an update in about a month on the state of the cream and whether or not I've lost my limbs from a jar of cream that's gone off 😐