You want to kit yourself out to make your own skincare, but buying everything the recipe asks for can quickly get quite costly, it’s a familiar story …
The six item list
I recently gave a friend’s son an aloe vera plant and shared some guidance and recipes for managing teenage skin. Keen to get going he made a list of the ingredients he’d need – just six items – and came back to ask me for recommendations as to where he could source the ingredients.
I gave him details of three of my favourite online sources but, knowing they can vary a lot, I did a bit of checking on his list to see if I could point him in the best direction for him.
Even I was surprised at what I found (exact details in a table below if you want the nitty gritty):
– only the most expensive supplier could provide all six items, so product price savings were lost by incurring extra p&p costs
– the smallest size available varied from supplier to supplier, making it hard to compare
– and, of course, the grade of product varied too which meant you needed to know a bit about what you were looking for to make the right choice.
I really sympathise, it doesn’t make it easy for wanna-be home skincare makers. But there is a solution … keep reading …
Totting it all up
All in all, once he’d selected the six items and a pot to put the finished product in, his bill was close to £50 – eek! I know the finished product will be good, but there have to be more cost-efficient ways of getting there …
I’m sure there are lots of home skincare makers who’ve experienced similar.
And I reckon those who’ve invested probably have bottles of out-of-date ingredients sat in the cupboard now.
I want to help you avoid this.
Lower cost options
– of course, one way is to limit yourself to really basic products that have very few ingredients, or ones that you’d use in other contexts anyway, like sunflower oil. That’s a bit boring.
– another way is to have a very small set of ingredients to do all your experimenting with. That means you miss out on the benefits of the different oils and essential oils so your products won’t Wow.
The solution is to use kits:
– kits contain all the ingredients you need to make a product, but in small enough quantities to ensure you’re not paying for what you won’t use
– when you buy a kit check to see a) that everything you need is included, especially the pot you will need to store the final product in and b) check what quantity you will end up making. Remember it’s best to make your products fresh when you want to use them. Each day the pot is sat in the fridge or on a shelf it is degrading. So, if your kit makes multiple pots, keep one for yourself and give the others to friends so they can be used right away.
– Field Fresh Skincare kits have everything you need (ingredients and jar) to make just one pot of cream at a time. That’s 50ml. This is about 30 applications of the body cream, 90 applications of the face and hand creams and hundreds of applications of the specialist balms for rough skin, for lips and for healing. The ingredients are pre-measured to exactly the right quantity needed and include the necessary preservatives to ensure your pot of cream will last for three months (or six months for the balms) – just the right amount of time for you to use it. Because it takes less than ten minutes to make your cream with a pre-measured kit, you can easily make it up just as you need it to ensure your products are as fresh as can be.
For the full range of Field Fresh Skincare kits see www.fieldfreshskincare.co.uk
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Comparative pricing for six ingredients across three different suppliers
| Supplier | Supplier 2 | Supplier 3 | ||||
| Minimum available size | Price | Minimum available size
(and 100ml size for comparison) |
Price | Minimum available size | Price | |
| Hazelnut oil | 100ml | £4.00 | 50ml (100ml) | £6.49 (£10.00) | Not available | |
| Calendula oil | 100ml | £6.00 | 30ml (100ml) | £6.49 (£12.49) | 100ml | £4.50 |
| Jojoba oil | 100ml | £5.00 | 50ml (100ml) | £5.49 (£9.49) | 50ml | £3.95 |
| Neroli essential oil (pure)
or Neroli essential oil (diluted 5% in carrier oil) |
2ml
or 10ml |
£8
or £5 |
2ml
or 10ml |
£21.99
or £7.55 |
Only have 5% dilute
10ml |
£2.95 |
| Chamomile essential oil* | 10ml Out of stock | £14 | 5ml | £12.89 | 5ml | £9 |
| Myrrh essential oil | 10ml | £7 | 10ml | £10.89 | Not available |
