Ok so this is an idea I had for a while. Unsweetened chocolate for baking is basically just cocoa solids with cocoa butter, right? Well what if I used that instead of cocoa butter when making body butter? Here’s my super dangerous double boiler setup for that purpose. Broken chopsticks at the bottom of a saucepan that I should not have filled with that much water, with a too-large glass heatproof vessel on top of the chopsticks. The extra chopstick on the top is for stirring the stuff as it melts. Water in the mix is bad because if it works, it will make it spoil faster. As you can see, it’s on too high a heat, with bubbles at the bottom. Right after I took this picture I turned off the heat as the chocolate had almost melted and the residual heat would take care of it. Anyway, ideally, I would use a safer double-boiler setup, wait til the stuff had cooled off a bit, then stir it all together and hope it would work. I won’t tell you what I did to wrangle the inner bit out of there and off the heat, without getting water from the double boiler setup into the mix, and how long I waited to do that. But I got it out of there. Here’s the recipe:
7 tbsp sunflower oil
1.5 ounces unsweetened chocolate (each chocolate bar has ounces written on there)
If I was more patient I could have used broken, or neatly sawn in half, chopsticks at the bottom of a slow cooker on low with water in there topped with a loosely closed heatproof jar, since I tend to use slow cookers on low as simmer pots in the winter anyway. Maybe later. At any rate if this stuff even works remains to be seen. Will let you know in an update on this post.
January 23, 2025 Update: I have inadvertently created a very effective nontoxic self-tanner. After letting this stuff sit overnight and cool in my fairly cold kitchen, I mashed it against the sides of the container with a wooden spoon to get the consistency kind of whipped up. Looked like brownie batter. To be honest it is the absolute perfect consistency for body butter, and I’ll use that ratio of wax to oil in each subsequent attempt. So I put a dab of it on and – hey presto, hands look like I spent a week at the beach in the middle of January. It looks entirely natural too which is kind of amazing. It also smells distinctly of cocoa powder when it’s worn. Since the sunscreen I have to use due to chemical sensitivity is the “bleach your skin” type with zinc oxide, I might just double it up with some of this.
January 24, 2025 Update: This stuff has some unusual properties. It is moisturizing, so there is that but there are others.
1. Stains clothing
2. Keeps skin looking tanned for a good day at least afterwards, even after washing the stuff off
3. If used as foot cream, seems to make you feel warmer
4. Gives you a bunch of energy, probably the caffeine getting absorbed into the skin
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