One of my favourite formulation magic tricks is when a rather boring looking dry powder magically transforms into rich, luxurious lather when it’s mixed with water. It’s pretty darn cool, and while this powder-to-foam sorcery is really impressive, it’s really easy behind the scenes and only takes about ten minutes to make.

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Today’s fragrant, foamy formulation includes two beautiful raw botanicals, uses easy-to-get ingredients, doesn’t need a preservative, and can easily be all natural. Let’s get into it!

The dry ingredients

Given the finished formulation is a dry powder, it probably won’t surprise you to hear that dry stuff forms the bulk of this formulation!

Up first: the bubbles! I’m using a blend of two dry surfactants: Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) & Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSa). Both are fine white powders that mix into the powdery base unseen, but then transform into beautiful bubbles when the body wash is mixed with water. This is, off course, the source of that powder-to-foam magic!

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These surfactants are gentle and lovely. If you’d like the formulation to be strictly all natural, simply replace the Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate with more Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate as it’s considered natural, while Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate isn’t. That said, Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate is beautiful and used by many formulators who care a lot more about things being natural than I do (Formula Botanica uses it often).

Some silky soft rice flour dilutes the surfactants a bit—sort of like water would in a liquid body wash. I purchased and experimented with a lot of different starches & flours while I was working on The DIY Powder-to-Foam Workshop and found that, when it comes to formulating, there’s a surprising amount of variability in the world of optically similar smooth white flours/starches. Everything from texture to pH to ability to absorb moisture varied—not only when comparing, say, tapioca flour to rice flour, but even in comparing different brands of rice flour. I used Erawan brand rice flour for this formulation; if you decide to switch that up for a different silky white starch or flour, expect changes in pH and potentially final consistency as well.

This next ingredient is included to help keep this powder-to-foam product a free-flowing, dispensable powder rather than a chunky damp mess: NATRASORB® BATH. While the INCI for this ingredient is just “tapioca starch”, it’s definitely not just tapioca starch. it’s super duper lightweight and airy—I’d say gram-for-gram it takes up at least 5x as much space as normal tapioca starch, and it also absorbs way more liquid than regular tapioca starch. If you’ve ever made bath salts there’s a good chance you’ve used NATRASORB® BATH before as it’s also very useful for incorporating essential & fragrance oils into bath salts while keeping them free-flowing.

An equal amount of tapioca starch (on the left) and Natrasorb® Bath (on the right).

The next two ingredients in our dry phase are really lovely ones that we can’t often include in our formulations: raw, dried calendula and chamomile flowers. In any sort of formulation that contains water, whole bits of dried plants are a pretty substantial preservation challenge—but there’s no water in this cleanser, which opens up all sorts of super fun formulation opportunities. Woohoo! I chose calendula & chamomile because I’m working on a series of white and gold formulations right now for Christmas gifts. The powdery base is white, so for the gold part, I’m using these two sunshine-coloured botanicals. You could definitely change them up, but be aware that switching out the botanicals will definitely impact the final product, and potentially in ways you might not expect (hibiscus, for instance, will really pull the pH down).

There’s just one more dry ingredient, and it’s probably not one you’re expecting: regular xanthan gum! In a liquid body wash, xanthan gum would thicken the water and therefore the whole formulation… but there’s no water in this dry body wash for xanthan gum to thicken, so why go to the bother of including it?

It’s not doing anything in the dry powder: where it shines is when that powder stops being dry! When you mix this body wash with water to use it, the xanthan gum will activate, giving a nice luxurious slip to the product. This is something I started doing while working on The DIY Powder-to-Foam Workshop after seeing gums in quite a few ingredient lists for commercial products, and it was immediately obvious that those big brands were onto something!

The wet ingredients

Our wet phase is quite tiny as too much wet stuff mixed into a powder will turn that powder into a paste, rather defeating the point! A small amount of liquid will more or less vanish into the powdery base, though, so we can include some without issues.

A bit of fractionated coconut oil makes the cleanser a bit more gentle and weighs the powder down a bit so it’s not super light and floaty when you use it. I recommend sticking to fractionated coconut oil (or medium chain triglycerides) rather than using a “real” oil as this FCO/MCT is really stable against oxidization.

And lastly, something for scent! I’m using Driftwood & Amber fragrance oil from Bramble Berry, but you can customize this formulation by using anything that strikes your fancy, including a natural fragrance oil or an essential oil. Just make sure whatever you want to use is safe for use at 1% in IFRA category 9 products.

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The gear

Most of what you’ll need to make powder-to-foam cleanser is standard DIY stuff:

• A digital scale
• Some spoons for scooping out ingredients & stirring—a random assortment from the thrift shop works beautifully
• A pH meter (or strips)
• Some smaller bowls to weigh ingredients into—prep cups or custard cups work really well

And three slightly less standard things:

• A blade coffee grinder you only use for DIYing—this is how we’re mixing everything together. One with a removable grinding cup is super duper useful if there’s room in your budget for one.
• A tight-fitting respirator, so you don’t inhale a bunch of fine, floaty powders and choke
• A pair of formulating goggles—to protect your eyeballs from those fine, floating powders.

Relevant links & further reading

• Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSa) in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Xanthan Gum in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• NATRASORB® BATH in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Calendula in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Fractionated coconut oil in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Coffee Grinder in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Dust mask (respirator) in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• All-Purpose Scale in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• How long will ______ last? What is its shelf life? in the Humblebee & Me FAQ
• pH
  • pH meter in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
  • pH measurement in cosmetic lab: why we dilute samples? from Skin Chakra
  • How to adjust the pH of your cosmetic products from Skin Chakra
  • Why do you create a 10% dilution of a formulation before measuring the pH? in the Humblebee & Me FAQ

Calendula & Chamomile Powdered Body Wash

Dry phase
13.4g | 33.5% ultra fine rice flour (USA / Canada)
8g | 20% Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) (USA / Canada / UK / Aus / New Zealand / Nigeria)
8g | 20% Sodium Lauryl Sulfoacetate (SLSa) (USA / Canada)
0.4g | 1% xanthan gum (USA / Canada)
6g | 15% NATRASORB® BATH (USA / Canada / UK / NZ)
2g | 5% dried calendula petals (USA / Canada)
1.2g | 3% dried chamomile flowers (USA / Canada)

Wet phase
0.4g | 1% fragrance oil
0.6g | 1.5% fractionated coconut oil (USA / Canada)

To pH adjust: citric acid (USA / Canada) or baking soda (USA / Canada)

Weigh the dry phase into a blade coffee grinder; I used the KYG Coffee Grinder Electric Grinder (Canada / UK / Aus) in the video and the KitchenAid Coffee and Spice Grinder (USA / Canada / UK) in the blog post (the smaller spice grinding cups are great for smaller development batches).

Scatter the liquids over the surface of the dry phase ingredients, give the grinder a wee shake to coat the liquids in powder, and blend until uniform. Stop and stir the mixture in the grinder at least once to ensure it is blending thoroughly.

Once you have a uniform powder, make a 10% solution to test the pH. Adjust to 4.5–5.5 with citric acid or baking soda. I needed to blend 0.1g of citric acid into my 40g batch to bring the pH from 5.83 to 4.8.

Now all that’s left is packaging it up; since this is a body wash make sure you choose something that is shower safe—no glass or paper board!

I used some plastic spice shaker bottles. If you’re going to gift this, you could package it in a zip-top plastic bag and mail it that way (flat things are usually cheaper to mail), along with instructions for your recipient to transfer the powder to an empty plastic spice bottle on their end.

To use, sprinkle this body wash over a wet loofah. Work it up into a gorgeous lather—once it’s all bubbly, use it like you’d use any body wash. Enjoy!

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this product does not contain any water, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the formulation, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this formulation in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams, this formulation will make 40g.
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this formulation, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• You can try corn starch, arrowroot starch, or plain tapioca starch instead of rice flour, but be aware this will change the final product.
• If you’d like to learn more about the surfactants used and compare them to ones you might already have so you can make substitutions, check out this page and read this FAQ. Ensure you stick to dry surfactants. I generally find Sodium Coco Sulfate (SCS) to be too harsh for this sort of cleanser.
• You can swap the xanthan gum for guar gum.
• I don’t recommend swapping out the NATRASORB® BATH.
• You can swap out the botanicals for different dried botanicals.
• You can substitute the fractionated coconut oil with a different stable ester like Isopropyl Myristate or Isoamyl cocoate.
• If you’d like to incorporate an essential oil, please read this.