I have experimented with a variety of oils in lotions and creams. This time, I decided to work with sea buckthorn berry oil. Here's an excellent profile of this oil by Swift Crafty Monkey. I had bought some of this oil to make the Antioxidant serum and wanted to try making a body cream featuring this oil. With winter approaching, I wanted something ultra moisturizing and thick. So I opted for sesame oil and decided to use Ecomulse, an emulsifier approved for use in organic natural products, to get a thick creamy consistency. When I was researching if there were any body creams that were commercially available with sea buckthorn oil, I came across an interesting product Bee By The Sea. Of course, I went straight to the ingredients and was really surprised to see there's no emulsifier in this product!!!!! Here are the list of ingredients: Aqua, Carthamus Tinctorious (safflower) seed oil, Aloe Barbadensis leaf juice, Honey, Tocopheryl Acetate, Panax Ginseng Root Extract, Cyclopentasiloxane, Hippophae Rhamnoides (Sea Buckthorn) oil, Royal Jelly, Panthenol, Polysorbate 20, Parfum (contains 100% pure sweet almond oil), Retinyl Palmitate, Ascorbic Acid It appears that the product has maybe atleast 10% safflower seed oil and water and no recognizable emulsifier. Sometimes I wonder if people forget to list all the ingredients in their products ... Anyways, back to my creation. I decided to use water, aloe vera juice, and veg. glycerin for my water phase and sesame oil, ecomulse, cetyl alcohol, and sea buckthorn oil for my oil phase. As usual, I continued to have trouble with the ecomulse. Things were going just fine: I had a rich cream until I added the preservative - when the thing started to get unstable. I reheated it and managed to salvage it. The orange color is from the Sea Buckthorn berry oil - it has a lot of Beta Carotene - that gives it the orange hue. The cream looks like a rich butternut squash soup or mango puree. My mango loving daughter saw it on the stove and demanded to eat it :-)
What are some of the purported benefits of this cream? The sea buckthorn oil is supposed to be good for eczema, psoriasis, burns, cuts, wounds. Sesame oil is a rich moisturizing oil also rich in vitamins like sea buckthorn. So my hope is this cream will be perfect for the approaching winter and also ease the bug bites (and resulting scratched skin) that my kids seem to periodically suffer from.
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