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Learn how to make rose lotion bars! These lovely lotion bars use rose infused oil and are great for the skin. They are easy to make and a wonderful addition to your homemade bath and beauty projects.

Using Garden Roses for Skin Care

We have a huge rose bush in the front yard of our house that we just kind of let go.

We haven’t really had the chance to do much to the front of the house yet as we’ve been so focused on getting the backyard where we want it, so I figured having a gigantic unruly rose bush covered in pink flowers wasn’t that much of a bad thing. At least it sort of covers up all of the ugly parts of the yard!

I knew I had to do something with all those roses, though, besides feeding them to my chickens (they go nuts for the petals). Lotion bars was the first thing to come to mind!

Rose petals are naturally good for the skin, being cooling and soothing to dry, inflamed, and itchy skin. They are perfect for use in lotion, creams, and lotion bars.

The first step if you are using fresh roses from your yard is to dry them. I like to use my homemade herb and flower drying screens for this.

The Big Book of Homemade Products for Your Skin, Health & Home

This recipe is adapted from the Cocoa Rose Lotion Bars in Jan Berry’s (of The Nerdy Farm Wife blog) newly updated and expanded book, The Big Book of Homemade Products for Your Skin, Health & Home.

You might remember Jan from my How to Make Soap for Beginners post, as it was her lovely Natural Soap Making eBook that has been so helpful to me in my soap making adventure!

Her new book is amazing and full of wonderful homemade bath, beauty, and health recipes using herbs and flowers!

Rose Lotion Bars Recipe

You will need a few things before you start this recipe.

It is nice to have a silicone mold to make your lotion bars. I used this flower and leaf one, but this round one is nice too. You could also try to improvise by pouring it into something you already have or can make at home (like a wooden soap mold, for example) and then cut into bars once it has solidified.

Pure rose essential oil can be very expensive, which is why geranium oil is listed as an alternative. I used this relatively inexpensive rose absolute oil blend and was happy with the results.

I did not use the alkanet root for coloring, but I did have some rose mica on hand so I added a pinch of that. To be honest it didn’t really do much for color as you can see from my photos below, so if you go that route you may want to use a bit more than small pinch.

The first step is to make an infused oil with dried rose petals. There are many methods for doing this, see my post on how to make infused herbal oils for more information.

I used equal parts olive, sweet almond, and rose hip seed oils, but many different carrier oils would work just as well.

Once the oil is fully infused, strain out the rose petals using a fine mesh sieve.

Use a double boiler, or make one yourself by using a stainless steel bowl or a smaller pot over a larger pot with about an inch of water in it.

Bring the water to a simmer and gently heat the oil, beeswax, shea butter, and optional alkanet root powder until everything has dissolved together.

If you are using beeswax bars instead of pastilles, cut them into smaller chunks and let them start to melt first before adding the shea butter. They will take longer to dissolve and overheated shea butter can become grainy.

Once everything has completely dissolved, let it cool for a minute or two before stirring in the rose essential oil.

Then pour the mixture into your mold of choice, and wait a few hours for them to completely harden before removing.

They popped right out of the mold very easily! I am really pleased with how these lotion bars turned out, and they were incredibly simple to make.

You could easily use other flowers instead of the roses as well, such as calendula or lavender. It’s an extremely adaptable recipe!

Here is my recipe for calendula lotion bars.

I really love this rose version, though. Jan Berry’s The Big Book of Homemade products for Your Skin, Health & Home is full of awesome ideas like this!

The Honey & Chamomile Cream sounds divine and might be what I make next, or maybe the Dandelion Body Butter. Really, every recipe sounds so enticing, I highly recommend checking it out!

If you have a lot of roses to use up, here are 10 things to make with roses!

Have you ever made anything fun with roses? I’d love to hear about it!

DIY Botanical Skin Care Recipes