We made bath bombs yesterday and they were a huge success. I made them ages ago, before kids, but never made more. Then when I had babies, bath bombs were a bad thing. We got one as a gift and it was so heavily dyed and strongly scented— it was a mess and my baby at the time kept putting her hands in her mouth so she got a mouth full of sour salt and there was a melt down. So I kind of blocked them out of my mind.
10 years later, my middle child is smitten with some Lush bath bombs she saw and was sad about the price and the scents. I told her we could make our own. She hears this a lot and I get mixed reactions—but this time she was 100% excited. They smell much better than the ones at Lush and she added sprinkles and made multicolored ones. My youngest made a bunch too.
There are so many you tube tutorials for these, I found a few but really it was just experimenting with a basic formula.
To Make:
- 1 cup baking soda
- 1/2 cup citric acid (I got this in bulk at the Indian grocery store)
- 1/2 cup epsom salt
- 1/2 cup corn starch
- 2-4 teaspoons water
- 1 TBL oil (we used light olive oil)
- 10 drops essential oil
- food coloring
Mix all the dry together, we used our hands with vinyl gloves. Then mix the wet together in a small cup and drizzle over the dry, mixing well to keep it from fizzing too much. You have to mix a long time. Then we added the food coloring, and then mixed again for a long time. Now, this is where is gets had to give exact amounts. It was to be wet enough to pack in into a mold and pop out. If it's too dry, it won't do that. So we added more oil or water as needed to it would hold a shape. We used silicon molds, and metal cups. If it crumbled when we tried to remove it, we added a bit more water and tried again, reusing the mix. They all worked great. Then, we let them sit out overnight to dry completely. The girls used them in foot bath and gave them a big thumbs up. Glitter may have been added to a batch as well.
