My previous recipe for Glycerine Wax cream had worked out quite nicely, so I was ready to try again. This time I wanted to make a cream that was a bit less waxy, but had aloe vera in it. I began with the basics.
1 cup olive oil
2 cups distilled water
3/4 cup aloe vera
1/4 cup glycerin
1 Tbsp + 4 oz beeswax
10 caplets lecithin
1 tsp vitamin E
12 drops lavender
4 tsp UltraMaize
2 cups distilled water
3/4 cup aloe vera
1/4 cup glycerin
1 Tbsp + 4 oz beeswax
10 caplets lecithin
1 tsp vitamin E
12 drops lavender
4 tsp UltraMaize
I started out by heating the olive oil alone for 1 minute in the microwave, then mixing together the water, aloe vera, glycerine, 1 Tbsp of the beeswax and lechitin and nuking those for 1.5 minutes. I whisked the two together quickly to begin mixing them, then I blended them with a hand blender. No good - it was soupy. I added in the vitamin E, lavender and UltraMaize but the UltraMaize didn't help with the soupiness.
The reason I had used so little beeswax to start is I have a hard time shaving it and my boyfriend was addicted to a video game. I finally got frustrated and pried him away from the game to chop up an 4oz container worth of dried flakes of beeswax, put it into 1/2 cup of the "soup" and nuked that. You can't really nuke solids, so this was a way to help it melt better. Then I added that back into the main mix and blended it. Voila!! Now it thickened. Now of course I had put TOO much wax into the mix, and as it cooled it got a little TOO solid. It was still usable, but a bit too waxy. Also, the water separated out almost immediately. I had 1 1/8 cup of water that was left when I scooped out the ending cream, which is over half of what went into it. Still, the cream was quite nice. Waxy, but nice.
The lesson here was to add in more lecithin, and more beeswax from the start. The reason I hadn't added more lecithin this time is (again) my boyfriend was busy - and we only had caplets that had to be cut open with a knife and have their insides squeezed out. The caplets are rolly and I had ALL sorts of trouble doing this. I was lucky to get the 10 caplets into the mixture. In experimenting afterwards, I found if you drop the caplets into boiling water, they pop open and you can then fish out the caplet part, leaving behind the insides pretty easily. So that's my plan for the next batch.