Goat Milk Lotion

After making goat milk soap for a while and seeing first hand how nourishing it is, I started wondering what other wonderful things could be made with it. Enter goat milk lotion. Who would've thought you could make lotion with milk? But you can, and it's actually very easy.

When I first started making it, I honestly thought it would be super complicated and involve a lot of chemistry and math (neither of which I'm at all good at), but it honestly doesn't.  In fact, it's less complicated to make than cold process soap.

4 oz bottles of lotion on display at the Festival on the Rivers.

Follow me on Vine, here.
Ingredients:
10 oz Distilled Water
8.5 oz Goat Milk (Pasteurized)
1.2 oz Shea Butter
1.7 oz Grapeseed Oil*
1 oz Avocado Oil*
1.2 oz Emulsifying Wax
1 oz Stearic Acid
.25 oz Preservative**
.1 oz Fragrance Oil (make sure it's body safe)
*You can substitute these for other good skin-nourishing liquid oils, such as Olive, Jojoba, Macadamia Nut, Sweet Almond, etc. 
** I use Optiphen, a paraben and formaldehyde free preservative.

Bottles and lids (I like the 4 oz bullet bottles best, but I recently made a batch of lotion with the 8 oz teardrop and 1 oz bullet bottles)

1 ounce bottles of lotion. . . I'll be listing these soon on our Etsy shop.

I know preservatives don't exactly have a great reputation for being healthy, but because this lotion has water based ingredients in it (and those particular ingredients can/will contain bacteria and are of a decomposing nature) a preservative is very necessary if you're going to sell or give away this lotion. Now, if you want to leave out the preservative, be sure to refrigerate your lotion and realize that it's going to have a very short shelf life. If you don't want to fool with keeping it in the refrigerator or using a preservative, a great skin nourishing alternative are solid lotion bars.

A 1 oz bottle of Optiphen preservative.

And if you want to try out our goat milk lotion, you can purchase it here (use code 10OFFMHF at checkout and receive 10% off your order)

Equipment that I use:
3 or 4 Microwave safe glass bowls
Glass Measuring Cup
2 Spoons
Ladle
Blender
Funnel
Microwave
Digital Scales
Note: All ingredients are measured by weight not volume.

How To:

Clean bottles drying. 

1) Sanitize your equipment (bowls, spoons, measuring cups, ladles, and blenders) and the bottles and lids by washing in a bleach solution (1 oz of bleach to every 1 gallon of water).

Measuring the oils and combining.

2) In a medium sized bowl, combine the avocado and grapeseed oils. Set them aside.

Measuring the stearic acid and emulsifying wax.

3) Measure out the correct amount of stearic acid and emulsifying wax, then add them to the avocado and grapeseed oils.

4) Microwave for about two minutes or until they're completely melted.

Shea butter melting.

5) Add the shea butter to the oil mixture, stirring to help it melt faster.

Measuring and combining the milk and distilled water.

6)  Add the distilled water to the milk and microwave for about 1-2 minutes until warm.

Pouring the warmed oil mixture into the water/milk mixture.

It's already starting to thicken up.

7) Slowly pour the oils into the milk/water mixture, stirring the entire time. The mixture should begin to thicken right away. Don't worry if it sort of resembles curdled milk, that's completely normal.

8) Using the ladle, pour the mixture into the blender. Pulse (very important that you pulse it only as it thickens very quickly) a few times until it gets creamy and a little thicker. . . . I usually pulse the mixture between 5-10 times and no more than that. Pour the thickened mixture into a different clean bowl.

Pouring the second batch of blended lotion into a bowl. 

I usually blend the mixture in two different batches or more I've doubled, tripled, or quadrupled the recipe. In this case, I was making 6 times my normal recipe.

9) Your lotion mixture may now have a lot of bubbles on top, but as you stir the mixture the bubbles will dissipate.

Just before stirring in the fragrance oil

10) Measure out the preservative and fragrance and pour them into the lotion, stirring to combine. Make sure they're both completely stirred in really well.

11) Using a funnel, fill your bottles up. If your lotion has thickened too much and is filling the bottles slowly, simply place it back in the microwave and heat for about 10-30 seconds or until it's thinner.

And the finished bottles. 6 x the recipe above produced over 30 bottles of lotion of varying sizes and scents.

The recipe above makes about 5 four ounce bottles of lotion with a little leftover that I usually pour into a bottle for us to use. It will also yield 1 eight ounce bottle + 1 one ounce bottle + 3 four ounce bottles all together, with a little leftover, of course, for me to keep. The batch of lotion pictured above and in the Vine video was six times the recipe listed in this post. It produced. . . . well, I honestly can't remember exactly how many bottles (over 30 for sure), but it was a lot (and I was very happy to be through with lotion making that day).

Have fun and enjoy your lotion!

P.S.

If you're planning on selling this lotion, be sure to label it accordingly. In the US and since lotion is considered to be a cosmetic by the FDA, that means it must have the ingredients listed in INCI format (Internation Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients). Some of the ingredients listed above are linked to a supplier - most of those will have the INCI name listed somewhere on the page you'll be redirected to. For the INCI names of other ingredients, visit here or here. 

Example: For the above recipe, the ingredients list might look something like this:

Ingredients: Water, Goat Milk, Grapeseed Oil (Vitis Vinifera), Shea Butter (Butyrospermum Parkii Fruit) Avocado Oil (Persea Gratissima), Cetearyl Alcohol, Polysorbate 60, Stearic Acid, Phenoxyethanol, Caprylyl Glycol, and Fragrance.

Also required on the label is the name of the product, the amount of lotion each bottle contains (such as 4 ounces, 8 ounces, etc) and the physical address where it was made.