Over the last 15 years I’ve spent far more money than I care to admit on DIY ingredients… and I’ve also thrown away a truly embarrassing number of bottles, baggies, and tubs of expired or useless ingredients. While I’m not thrilled about all that wasted money, it did teach me some lessons—and hopefully I can save you some money by sharing them.
So, without further ado, here are six DIY skincare ingredients you do not need—especially when you first get started.
Post Overview
The fancy temptation
This is definitely the ingredient category I get the most post-purchase questions about and I GET IT. Fancy actives are so alluring, especially if you’re moving into DIYing after spending big bucks on fancy peptide serums and vitamin creams.
It’s so easy to find the star peptide or vitamin from an expensive store bought cream, buy it with the notion of DIYing your own version, and then two weeks later you’ve got two teaspoons of an ultra-precious liquid that you’re not sure how to use.
Peptides are an especially tempting fancy ingredient
What am I talking about when I say “fancy” active? As a maker, I’d say it’s some something you’re sort of scared to use. That could be because it’s really expensive, or because you’re not sure how to use it—either because the instructions are intimidating, or just because you’ve got no idea where to start.
So, what do you do if you want to work with fancy ingredients?
One: develop and hone your research skills. When you can research, you can figure out how to use ANY ingredient.
Learn more:
Two: you need some experience with less expensive ingredients under your belt. Experience will make you more confident that you can do a fancy ingredient justice. Combined with research skills, you’ll go from “I’m kinda of scared to use this” to “I’m not totally sure this will work, but I know I’m starting from a good place, so let’s get making!”
Of course there will always be ingredients you’ll find worryingly expensive, but you’re far less likely to buy something pricey and leave it to rot on a shelf when you’ve got solid research skills and some good experience under your belt!
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Where on earth am I supposed to put this?
I still mess up on this front every now and then thanks to the unavoidable ambiguity of ordering ingredients online.
It could be gigantic jugs (or drums) of oil that were a WAY better price per ounce than a smaller bottle—something that seemed reasonable when it was just a number on a screen, but when it shows up, it’s way larger than you thought it would be.
I bought this cupboard months after ordering those giant jugs of oil at the bottom
It could be ingredients that have to live in the fridge, but you don’t have any fridge space to spare.
Maybe it’s something that’s super light and fluffy, so it takes up WAY more room than you thought they would when you ordered them. I recently ordered a kilo of silica, and it turns out that fills a bag the size of a large throw pillow. Oops.
I’ll be the first to admit that my storage solutions have grown to accommodate my ever-expanding collection of ingredients, packaging, and “under surveillance” formulations, but this does mean formulating-related parts of my home are always one ingredient order away from sheer madness.
So, before you add something to your cart, think about whether or not you have a suitable home for it. If you’re anything like me if probably won’t stop you, but at least you thought about it, right?
Nothing lasts forever
In my experience, new makers buy way too many essential oils. I know I did! In my early making days I spent hours reading the reviews on New Directions Aromatics and adding dozens of bottles of promising essential oils to my cart. I quickly built up a gigantic collection of essential oils that I couldn’t hope to use before they expired.
Essential oils are natural products that change with time. A few—like patchouli—get better with age, but most don’t. Old, oxidized essential oils don’t smell the same as they did when they were fresh, and oxidization creates compounds in that can be harmful to skin and increase the chances of negative reactions.
According to Tisserand, “Most essential oils keep well for at least 1-2 years”. I know that sounds like a long time (it certainly did to me when I was buying every essential oil in sight, confident I could finish them all in a year or two)—but if you’re only making small batches for yourself and you’re following safe (and usually low) usage rates, you’re probably not going to finish a dozen bottles of essential oil quickly enough.
Speaking of usage rates: essential oils are very chemically complex and each one is unique—meaning every essential oil has its own safe usage rate, and some very popular, familiar essential oils have really low safe usage levels (sob). So, if you don’t know how to research and calculate those safe levels—especially when blending multiple essential oils—I think it’s safer to go without.
Learn more: How to naturally scent lotions with essential oils and natural fragrance oils
Of course I know many (most, even) people will still want to use essential oils in their skincare, and I 100% understand! They are lovely ingredients and can be used to create gorgeous products. Just make sure you treat them like the potent, complex ingredients they are. Do lots of research, buy small bottles, store them somewhere cool and dark, and choose essential oils with relatively forgiving safe usage rates like lavender, peppermint, rosemary, spearmint, and sweet orange.
But it’s 75% off…
This might be the most seductive one yet—it’s certainly proven irresistible to yours truly far too many times. It’s those “last chance”/ clearance ingredients. The ones a company is selling off at a massive discount because they’re discontinuing it.
Ingredients are discontinued all the time for all sorts of reasons.
It could be that the manufacturer has stopped making it all together, so even if it’s really popular, the supplier can no longer get it. If that’s the case and you already know you adore this ingredient and have several formulations that rely on it, definitely stock up!
But… if you’ve never used the ingredient before, you should probably save your money. If you fall in love with it you won’t be able to get more. And if you try to head off that possibility by ordering a ton, you’ll be stuck with lots if you don’t like it. (Or even if you do like it, honestly. New Directions Aromatics discontinued their zeolite clay around 2013, and I loved it so I stocked up… I think I still have 3kg of untouched zeolite clay at the back of a cupboard somewhere ).
I’m learned the hard (and expensive) way that sometimes an ingredient is discontinued because it’s not very popular, and for good reason. Every time I’ve ordered a new-to-me discontinued/clearance essential oil, the first sniff has made it very clear why it was discontinued!
That’s a butter?
This isn’t a hard “no”, but a “be aware”.
If you’ve ever seen a butter for sale and thought “huh, I didn’t know that plant made a butter”—something like aloe, strawberry, or hemp butter—chances are good that ingredient was actually a pseudo butter.
Pseudo butters are made by blending some sort of neutral buttery base (often inexpensive hydrogenated oils that aren’t too different from vegetable shortening) with extracts, fragrances, essential oils, and/or carrier oils to create something butter-y that isn’t a “true” butter like shea or cocoa butter.
There’s nothing wrong with these faux butters, but you should be aware of how similar they can be to one another. New Directions Aromatics sells over 30 different pseudo butters, but if you look more closely you’ll see they’re all mostly (often 90%+) “non-GMO soybean butter”. If you want to try some of these butters, go for it, but don’t order a ton of them until you’re certain you like the feel of the base, because that’s mostly what you’re getting.
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Bare butters
My last “save your money” ingredient is a continuation of the butters discussion, and one I expect some people will disagree with.
Tread carefully with unrefined butters because they can have strong smells that you might not like, or just might not want in everything you make.
I adore unrefined cocoa butter, but it has a very distinct chocolate-y smell that will come through in your creations. That can be delicious, but even my cocoa-besotted self will admit that the smell of chocolate doesn’t pair well with everything (cocoa butter + tea tree oil = blech).
These are shea seeds!
I’ve received SO many comments over the years from people who’ve ordered lots of unrefined shea butter only to discover it smells nothing like the beloved shea butter lotion that inspired the purchase. In my opinion, the smell of unrefined (or raw) shea butter is harder to work with than raw cocoa butter. Raw shea is smokey, fatty, and a bit nutty, and that smell is pretty assertive. If your shea is unrefined and you’re making a body butter with it, that body butter is going to smell like raw shea butter.
You can add essential oils, but that will create a product that smells like raw shea butter plus lavender/mint/rosemary/etc.; that shea scent is not going to vanish because you added an essential oil.
So, if you aren’t certain you like the smell of a raw butter and want that smell as part of your products, I think it’s best to get refined versions because they’re much more versatile.
What ingredient(s) do you wish you’d passed on?
In my opinion, essential oils are the most overrated ingredient. Unless you buy directly from the trusted manufacturer, you never know how much of actual essential oil is in the bottle. Don’t get me wrong, I love the smells and their complexity that humans won’t be able to reproduce in a lab maybe for at least another century.
Marie, may I place a request for an article about retinol, retinoids and where to get the ingredients if you’re a hobbyist?