Latest Experiment: Foot Butter!

I know, this is neither the ranty nor hilarious post I promised. I've been a lazy bum lately with my blog and my Tweeting. But now I have something to document.

So, hopefully starting next week, I'll be dedicating a day or two to walk-in partial sessions: Head-to-shoulders, hands, or feet, or a combination of the three.  This requires some signage for advertising and pricing purposes, and I looked at the prices online, and a super simple sandwich board runs about $130.  Well crap, I can do that for less!  Right?

Hoo boy.

That sign is a whole other post of its own that I probably won't do.  Today's mad science experiment is foot butter for said sessions.  The idea was the make Plain, Lavender, and Peppermint.  Since I can't find a satisfactory cream that doesn't have 20 ingredients in it, I decided to wing it!  (This is often how I cook, too...)

Abundance Foot Butter ingredients:

• Shea butter
• Jojoba oil (actually it's a liquid wax, but whatever)
• Cocoa butter
• Dead Sea salt
• Love
• Blood, sweat, and tears (figuratively speaking)

I should have photo documented this journey.  Oh well.

I started with 10 oz of shea, 1 oz of jojoba, a chunk of cocoa, and some salt.  My idea with the salt was to hopefully dissolve it in for the mineral content.  Yeah.  It doesn't really.  Oh well.  Maybe later I'll mix it in, finely ground, as an exfoliant.  Maybe.  We'll see.

I started out gently melting the shea in pyrex on the lowest setting on my cook top.  I added the ounce of jojoba and half an ounce of cocoa butter., poured it into squeeze tubes (a big one plain, two smaller ones lavender and peppermint, 15 drops in their respective bottles) and stuck it in the fridge to cool.  It was thick, but it came out of the tiny orifice of the cap so I thought it was fine.

I got up this morning to go to work and try it out on a client, and it had set so thickly overnight that it wouldn't come out anymore.  Well crud.  I could still use it but I had to remove the cap to squeeze it out.

Conclusion on Attempt 1:
I knew shea was thick, but holy cow.  One ounce of jojoba is not enough to significantly loosen up ten ounces of shea and half an ounce of cocoa.  In spite of this, the mixture melts like a dream into a lusciously warm and smooth massage oil when I rub it in my hands.  I used the lavender, and it needed more essential oil; the smell was pretty evenly lavender, cocoa, and shea across the board, with nothing really sticking out.

So, on to Attempt 2.

I've remelted approximately six ounces of the original mixture (all I could get back that didn't have essentials in it) and added just under half a cup of jojoba, so it's approximately a... what... 60:40 split of shea:jojoba?  Something close to that.  It's cooling right now, so it'll be a while before I can give more detail, but I'm hoping that loosens it up enough to be squeezable.

More to come!

Update:  I've been using the foot butter as my massage lotion this past week and I do like it, but it's still too viscous for my squeezy tube.  I'm going to attempt another mixture with jojoba and neem in greater proportion to shea next.