In my last post I mentioned I was going to try and duplicate making my own LUSH shower jellies and bubble bars. Well, I was at least successful with one of those - the bubble bars. Unfortunately I wasn't as successful with the shower jelly.
LUSH shower jellies are made using carrageen which is a vegan product. After doing some research, I found that although carrageen is available (and expensive), it's not readily available. An alternative to carrageen is Irish moss which is more readily available and once I was able to pick up some Irish moss, I tried my hand at making my own shower jelly with it.
Well ... it didn't work. I'm not sure if I didn't use enough Irish moss, but after refrigerating for over 12 hours, I had a soupy mess rather than jelly (the soupy mess did give me lots of bubble though!). Another downfall of using Irish moss is that it is a type of algae and it can have a bit of an odor. It actually turned my "jelly" a lovely brownish color and smelled really bad ... YUCK!!
After doing more research, I've discovered others have duplicated these shower jellies using plain gelatin ... so I'm going to give it another try!
The bubble bars were a little easier to make with most of the ingredients easy to find. I made two varieties of these, one which happened to have brown spots appear after a few days. I ended up posting on a soap making forum and they "guessed" it was the oil I used in conjunction with the fragrance. The other batch turned out perfectly.
... off to try the gelatin
** UPDATE: Well unfortunately the gelatin really didn't work any better than the carrageen ... maybe I didn't add enough gelatin?? ... back to the drawing board
