Do you DIY?

[karen]

I pretty much DIY everything..there are ups and downs with it, and for the most part I see the big challenge to the home crafter as being access to preservatives and some of the other stuff. Health food stores stock a lot of neat stuff- but getting it into a usable form is a pain some days. Oh, and you can go broke pretty quickly trying all sorts of actives.

I've been playing with that gel stuff, and got the idea to make a double aloe gel- double strength aloe, double the thickener, double the preservative so that you can DIY to your heart's content without having to worry about a lot of the weird chemistry stuff. You could mix in oils, actives, powders, thin it with any kind of hydrosol or even herbal tea. There are a couple of limitations- it's not tolerant to acids, or salts- and sometimes the results are a bit surprising.

Is that something you'd be interested in?

[egerandi]

Absolutely interested! I've been DIYing for some months now, and just coming to realizing my limits (and getting a bit lazy about it too). I bought actives and bases and powders and stuff, and they are just sitting there, hehe. I would love that gel with some tips on how and what to mix. I've been making simple stuff like cleansers, scrubs, masks, even shampoo and body wash with some success (my BF is missing the bubbles, hehe). So yeah, please and thank you

[sewwies]

Sounds fun! My skin breaks out from so many random thing's it would be cool to kind of start from scratch and start adding things bit by bit

[zeebs]

maybe maybe not. I'm a DIYer but I'm also really really lazy.

[Cupcake]

I love the idea but where I live, I lack access to the ingredients (within my budget). I tinker around with carrier oils and some basic essential oils, but that's as far as I can go at the moment. I'm living vicariously through Karen's escapades in skincare formulating!

[mgmsrk]

Sounds good to me, I use several natural oil’s as moisturizers, I don’t think it would be worth the shipping to buy them thickened but I would love to be able to do it myself.

[Rhys]

All my own perfumes and some skincare, though since I'm not working for Markey anymore my ingredients connection has pretty much dried up - it's painfully expensive to get stuff shipped here.

I do have a fair whack of organic aloe gel in the fridge with some food grade preservative in it, oddly enough, a bottle of optiphen, some oils, and a few dozen attars - plus things like honey, tomatoes, yoghurt and the like that are available easily locally. But no new-and-neat actives to play with.