Humblebee & Me turns 14 today! If it was a person, Humblebee & Me would’ve just started the 9th grade and could now get their driving learner’s permit (where I’m from, at least).
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In the last fourteen years, Humblebee & Me has gone from being a blog I worked on in my free time to all my creative pursuits (photography, DIY skincare, cooking, book binding, costuming, and more) to my full time job. I’ve learned so much about formulating, business, teaching, and myself since 2011, and I’m grateful every single day that I get to spend so much time doing what I love and sharing it with people like you who love it, too.
To celebrate nearly a decade and a half of sharing my DIYs with the world, I’ve brainstormed up fourteen important formulating lessons that I wish I’d learned earlier; hopefully they’ll save you lots of time and money!
1
I learned this first lesson the hard way well before launching Humblebee & Me: if an ingredient stinks in the tub or bottle, it will still stink when you make something with it. Unrefined shea butter and lanolin were the two ingredients I really learned this with; my friends still remember that rank sheep-scented lip balm nearly 15 years later!
Obviously the strength of the scent and the amount of the ingredient you use both play a role, but in general, if the smell of an ingredient makes you gag… tread carefully. Keep usage levels low and make a small batch so it’s not too heartbreaking if you have to chuck it out. I’d also recommend starting with really simple formula that doesn’t contain any really expensive actives—you don’t want to feel like you have to use something that smells disgusting because it has $15 of fancy peptides in it.
The sub-lesson on the stink front is: no, you can’t fix a super stinky DIY by drowning the stench with essential oils or fragrance oils. Unless the stink is just a faint whiff, you end up with gross smell + the smell of your essential oils, and that’s still not great. If you’ve ever used a “lavender scented” dog poop bag, you’ll know that note of lavender doesn’t help the overall olfactory experience very much. You also run the very real risk of exceeding safe usage levels, depending on the essential oil/fragrance oil you’re using.
Beware the stink: 5 ingredients that will make your formulations smell awful
2
In my first year of making, I spent hundreds of dollars chasing miracle carrier oils. A single glowing review or blog post about a carrier oil clearing up a patch of eczema or curing stubborn acne was enough for me to throw it in my cart and give it a try. In a matter of months I had dozens of bottles of precious oils that never did the magical wonderful thing that made me buy them. Some definitely helped with my acne (my main skincare challenge), and I loved the feel of others, but none of them were the cure-all miracle I’d been hoping for.
Carrier oils are great, but they aren’t magic potions. They also go in and out of style—it seems like there’s always a trending oil and butter that everyone is enamoured with. It’ll be absolutely inescapable for months, and then suddenly it’ll be replaced with whatever the new exciting thing is. Every single one of these trendy oils/butters sounds absolutely amazing, with blog posts detailing their merits and comment sections full of miraculous testimonials.
When I first started DIY that trending darling was coconut oil, and it felt like every third pin I saw (Pinterest was also huge at the time) was about some new miracle use for coconut oil. I tried many of them and was generally disappointed. Coconut oil is a great ingredient, but you’ve got to be honest about its strengths and weaknesses. It is really slippy, making it great in lip balms and massage products—but that same slippy-ness makes it far too oily and greasy to work well as a “one ingredient hand lotion” (a thing I definitely saw at least one person rave about via Pinterest).
Also: carrier oils can and will go rancid! Some will last for years, but others can start to smell dodgy in less than a year. I understand wanting to try every fancy carrier oil you read about, but try to pace yourself (and order small bottles if you’ve never tried something before). A mini fridge for storing your ingredients in also helps!
Figure out what you love (trendy or not!), take hype about trending oils and butters with a grain of salt, and be wary of claims that sound too good to be true. You’ll save a lot of money!
Read more: 7 pieces of equipment for intermediate formulators
3
Speaking of money: don’t buy 500mL (~16 fl oz) bottles of essential oils. I know the price per millilitre is better—that’s what got me, too. Why buy 15mL (0.5 fl oz) of essential oil when the cost-per-mL of the 500mL bottle is 1/10th the price?
The biggest reason is that essential oils don’t last forever, and unless you’re making thousands of pounds of product scented with that essential oil every year, you are very unlikely to finish that big bottle quickly enough. It’s better to pay more per ounce for a smaller bottle than get a “deal” only to throw most if it away.
Additionally: using old, oxidized essential oils can trigger lifetime sensitization reactions which, frankly, suck. This happened to me with citrus essential oils, and I’m so dang peeved at past me for ruining delicious citrusy scented skincare things for the rest of my life because I was trying to save a few dollars.
4
Most of my early DIY budget went to ingredients, but I really wish I’d invested in a good scale earlier. I burned through quite a few $20 kitchen scales before spending roughly $70 on a MyWeigh iBalance 700. I’ve had it since 2017 and it still works wonderfully (though I now mostly use my Jennings TB500 these days).
Aside from the longer life, the best part about a better scale is that they usually plug into the wall and won’t auto shut-off half way through weighing out an ingredient!
More information on scales:
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5
If you want reliable results + to learn as quickly as possible, you have to work in weights & percentages. I know the idea of mixing math with fun making time can be a hard sell, but I promise it is worth the learning curve.
Learn more:
I go into a lot more detail on working in weights percentages in my DIY Skincare for Beginners mini-course, so if you’d like to start your DIY journey off on the right foot (and skip all the beginner mistakes I made!), I really recommend checking it out 🙂
6
I’ve learned time and time again that I am far too confident in my ability to remember things. I’ve lost count of the number of time I’ve pulled a bottle of lotion or tube of lip balm out of a drawer only to find the only thing I can remember about it is past me thinking “I don’t need to label this, I’ll definitely remember what it is!”. D’oh!
So: label everything you make with a name, date, and whatever other information you might need to tie that bottle/tube/tin/jar back to your notes, and put clear tape over the label so it doesn’t smudge or fade.
7
Speaking of notes: there is no such thing as too many notes or too much detail! The longer I formulate, the more detailed my notes get. Times, temperatures, weights, tools, the order I do things—everything matters. Whenever I have to go back and refer to my old formulation notebooks I get really frustrated with past me and her infuriatingly vague notes.
8
The necessity of paying for shipping on ingredient orders means I always have with several “in progress” carts scattered around the internet. By the time I finally place an order, some of the things in my cart might’ve been sitting there for months, and I don’t always remember why I wanted them. Was it for a specific formulation? Did a patron tell me I just had to try it? Did it just sound cool?
You can avoid those “what on earth is this, why did I buy it, and how do I use it?” moments by reading all the supplier documentation for everything you buy (or even think about buying). That’s usually enough to spark your memory and/or inspire you.
If your supplier doesn’t provide enough information about their ingredients to give you some idea of how to use them, consider shopping somewhere else.
9
Researching your ingredients with your suppliers is just step one, though. Develop and hone your research & pattern recognition skills: the ability to research an ingredient so you understand everything it can do and how to use it, or dissect a new type of formulation so you know what matters and what doesn’t, is essential to being a formulator rather than just a recipe follower.
Learn more:
10
Oh, and one more thing on research: make sure you’re researching skincare, not diet. Lots of studies are done on eating a thing rather than putting that thing on your skin, and you cannot assume those results translate. For a rater extreme example: a (dietary) study might find chilli peppers have great anti-inflammatory benefits, but that doesn’t mean they belong in a face cream! Don’t assume that anything you can eat is good for your skin—or vice versa.
Learn more: Is edibility a good indicator of ingredient safety?
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11
You can and will learn a lot from doing your own work and experiments, but it is really helpful to have a starting point in the form of a course. A good course will ensure you don’t have any big blind spots and can introduce you to new ways of thinking and working that will save you years of frustrating trial & error.
I’ve earned two diplomas from Formula Botanica, and even though I started studying with them after I’d been making for several years, I learned a lot. Readers have told me the difference between my “pre” and “post” diploma formulations is really obvious, and I have to agree.
If you’d like to try out Formula Botanica for free, registration is currently open for their upcoming formulation masterclass. In it, you’ll learn how to make a gorgeous all-natural Pumpkin Face Cream, and you can see if studying with them might be the next step in your formulation journey. You can grab your free ticket by clicking here.
My reviews:
- My Formula Botanica Review: Diploma in Organic Skincare Formulation
- My Formula Botanica Review: Diploma in Organic Haircare Formulation
12
Lots of more complex ingredients have easy to remember, nice-sounding names like “Natural Emulsifying Wax” or “Preservative Eco”, but those names don’t tell you what the ingredient actually is—what it’s made of. That’s why you have to pay attention to the INCI for your ingredients; it’s the ingredient list for your ingredients. INCI (pronounced “inkey”) stands for International Nomenclature of Cosmetic Ingredients, and it’s a mixture of conventional scientific names, Latin, and English words.
Not only can this can save you money by stopping you from buying the same ingredient four times under four different names, but it is absolutely essential if you want to sell your products and need to write out an ingredient list.
13
Many white flakes & pellets look the same but do not perform the same. Make sure you’re double checking the labels on your tubs and baggies as you work! If you use cetearyl alcohol or soy wax instead of a similar looking emulsifying wax… well, that doesn’t work at all.
14
One of the most important ingredients and teachers in formulating is totally free: time. Time can turn a too-thin lotion into something that’s just right, but it can also transform a perfectly scoop-able body butter into something crumbly and hard or grainy. Don’t forget about time—it’ll happen whether you like it or not! Work time into your formulating process so you can be confident your creations are stable.
It’s been an amazing, educational, fascinating, and flat-out fabulous first 14 years. Thank you so much for all your support ❤️ I can’t wait to see what I learn in the next 14
I’d love it if you shared some of your formulation learnings in the comments below!
I’m dying for you to make a ph safe deodorant this year
Happy birthday! I’ve learned so much from you. Thanks for everything you do.
Happy birthday to humblebee and you ! 🙂
Thank you for everything marie!