How to make bath bombs with the wow factor

I love making skin and body products that I sell at a local Farmers Market and one of my most popular selling items is the bath bomb. I’m assuming you know how to make bath bombs, but I’ll give you the basic recipe that I enjoy using with great success plus some ideas on how to make bath bombs with the wow factor.

For my basic bath bomb recipe I use the following ingredients:

500 grams of baking soda (baking soda)

250 grams of citric acid (granular or fine powder)

100 ml of oil mixture

This recipe makes a nice bomb that fizzes well in the bath. You can add more citric acid if you want it even more fizzy, but I think this amount works just fine. The tricky part of making any type of bath bomb is during the mixing stage of the oils, as there is a fine balance between absorbing just the right amount of liquid, without triggering the chemical reaction that gives the bomb its “fizz.” I find it’s best to put the oils in a plastic bottle with a trigger and then spray carefully, ONE spray at a time, stirring the whole time. Spray evenly around the combined ingredients by repeating the spray/stir action, stirring constantly, being careful not to over-wet the ingredients. Once the mixture begins to hold together and forms a ball when pressed by hand, STOP SPRAYING. Think wet sand castles because this is the consistency you are looking for. You then need to stack the mixture into your molds packing it as tight as possible so that it overfills each half. Then press the two halves together just once. Don’t twist or you’ll end up with 2 halves of a bath bomb. It doesn’t matter if the two halves are nicely aligned or not, or even if they are closed, at this stage you are simply encouraging the mixture to take on a nice rounded shape. Remember, the more batter you put into your pans, the bubblier they will be.

So how do you make bath bombs with the wow factor? To achieve this, you need to be able to create good combinations of essential oils with different carrier oils such as almond oil, avocado oil, apricot kernel oil to name just a few. Experiment with adding colors and glitter for a very pretty girl-like bombshell. One of my favorite bath bombs has to be a decadent chocolate bomb where I use 50g of grated cocoa butter, which is combined with the other dry ingredients, and then I add a mixture of almond oil and chocolate fragrance. I also color it chocolate brown and grate a small amount of a chocolate bar into the mold before pouring the mixture. The result is a luxurious moisturizing bomb that has tiny specks of cocoa butter and smells good enough to eat!

The heart shaped bath bomb molds you can buy also produce a wow effect bath bomb as you can place a combination of dried rose petals or rose hips in the mold or alternatively dry lavender flowers they look beautiful if they are placed in the bottom of the mold. Just be careful not to overdose on extras like dry botanicals and glitter because obviously all of this stuff will end up in the bathwater and not everyone likes sitting in a tub of soggy petals!

How to make bath bombs with the wow factor is all about experimentation and letting your creative juices flow. At the end of the day, the only limit is your imagination! Have fun!