How To Make Cream-Part 1: The Basics

Hi good morning.
today ill be talking about how to make bodycare: Cream.

This is a small online course that i have weekly where ill be talking about the theory on how to make a certain skincare. So this week; ill be talking about how to make cream.

Cream is a combination of water and oil. If you have watch about our lotion making course here 2 weeks ago; you will realise that they are almost the same. The only difference is lotion has more water phase and less oil phase while creams on the other hand have more oil phase.

Example in a lotion; 80% of it is water; while in cream about 40-60% is water and the rest is oil.

So why use cream when one can use lotion?

When you use cream; you tend to get this oily skin feeling beause of the high oil content so many people prefer to use lotion. However; cream is more suitable to be used on dry and very dry skin.

Also if you were travelling to winter and cold climate area; cream is a better choice rather than lotion.

Whats the basic ingredients used in cream making?

The ingredients are exactly like the ones in lotion. The categories would be:
1) Water Phase
2) Oil Phase
3) Emulsifiers
4) Thickeners
5) Preservatives.

Ill be going into details about these categories in the next few days.

Now a point to note that cream; though like lotion; has the same type of ingredients; it has a higher percentage of oils.

So what does it exactly do?

Oils in skincare are usually used to give moisturising effects. So in cream it would be the same things. We call it as emoliants, and occlusive agents.

Emoliants

emoliants means its moisturising. When you apply a product with high oil content like cream; it will give you this moisturising feeling. Most carrier oils gives this. Example avocado oil, sweet almond oil etc

Occlusive Agent

Occlusive agent means something like barrier. In human skin we have lots of water in it. These small tiny water molecules are under the skin and it gives the skin the whole stretch nice feeling.

However; due to weather and climate changes (especially in hot areas like in malaysia); the water tends to get evaporated out. This would result in dry skin, cracked and very wrinkle-y skin.

So this is when the oils as occlusive agent comes in. These oils when applied to skin in the form of cream would form a barrier on the skin to avoid water from been evaporated out.

Hence the reason a cream would be better choice for dry skin because it avoids the skin to get drier.
so these are the few points to note about creams.

In the next few post i would discuss about the ingredients categories and after that we will get into recipes.

Thank you for reading.

P/S: If you prefer to watch a video of me explaining this click here. Its in Dual Language (Malay & English)

If you would like to download our FREE online recipes and online courses; click here.


To read part 2 click here

Nisha