Homemade Baby Balm

 

 

Recently Millie developed a rash on her face and I wanted to make something nice and natural, so I roped in my friend Robyn to come and help me make a baby balm.  

 

We did a bit of research and www.wellnessmama.com gave us some good ideas. I was keen to use chamomile for it's soothing properties and Robyn wanted to use olive oil. We also didn't want a barrier cream (which has zinc oxide in) and a lot of recipes were for this.

 

Eventually we settled on this recipe which was a bit of a mixture of ones we'd found. We got our ingredients from a local health food shop and from Amazon.

 

Beeswax is antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and locks in moisture.

Coconut oil is pretty amazing and I could probably do a blog post just on this but essentially it is packed with good fatty-acids and proteins which can help repair skin, moisturise (although I've found on its own it can actually be quite drying) and protect the skin.

Cocoa Butter is a deep hydrator

Shea Butter again is a good moisturizer and can help heal skin

Olive oil acts as a anti-inflammatory, contains anti-oxidants and those great fatty-acids which fight naughty free radicals

Lavender oil inhibits bacteria and therefore can help protect against infection and its scent is calming

Chamomile oil is antiseptic, antibiotic, disinfectant, bactericidal and anti-allergenic

Vitamin E oil promotes healing

 

This is a tiny overview of the ingredients we used, I could go on and on and on, but I won't, you can do as much research into them as you like.

 

The process was easy:

1) Weigh your ingredients out. We used digital scales that you can reset and put everything in one bowl. The less bowls and spoons you can use the better as its all oily and a bit hard to wash.

2) Melt the ingredients over a pan of water (make sure the water isn't touching the bowl).

3) Once its all melted, leave to cool for a few minutes then blitz with a hand blender (preferably an old or spare one and keep it just for this kind of thing) this will stop it curdling. Put on an apron and put the bowl in the sink as you want to limit the cleaning! It'll look like this:

5) Allow to cool then decant into your jars/containers. Robyn had a great idea for this - spoon it all into a freezer bag, cut off the corner and pipe it into your containers as though it were icing.

 

I've used this on Millie's rash which looks a bit like eczema and its clearing up. I'm using it as a nappy cream and all the ingredients are safe for using with cloth nappies. It also makes a nice hand cream for you.

 

 

Nb. We doubled the amounts so there was enough for the two of us!

 

Em x