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Melissa’s Toolkit: Honey and Beeswax

3/3/2018

Tailored Touches carefully crafts all of its personal care products from the very best “good for you” ingredients. With Melissa’s Toolkit series, we want to give you all an inside look at why and how we use what we do.

Ingredients: Honey & Beeswax

We decided to start this series off with ingredients that are near and dear to our hearts: honey and beeswax! We come from a long line of beekeepers. My dad was one, his grandfather before him, and now we keep the tradition going with my son’s bee hives. In addition to our love for bees, honey and beeswax happen to be “good for you” ingredients, too. What a good place to start!

Honey

Natural honey is a great skincare product because it is a natural humectant, which means that it naturally draws moisture to the skin and then keeps it there. In other words, it is a kind of natural moisturizer. As an added benefit, it also keeps irritants out of the skin.

Honey is a nutritional, natural form of sugar. It retains its “good for you” properties as long as it is not heated over about 95° (the temperature of a normal bee hive). Once you heat it beyond what nature intended, you destroy many of its nutritional properties.

If you play by those rules, honey will last forever. In fact, it is the only food that never spoils. If you found honey from the Stone Ages, it would still be good… maybe a bit crystallized but still as good as ever.

So, how do you know if you have the good stuff? One trick is to look for that crystallization. Real honey will crystallize while the diluted, over-heated, or ultra-filtered stuff will not. If you have crystallized honey, just put the bottle in a pot of warm water until the crystals melt back into honey. Just keep it below 95°…

Beeswax

Honey’s counterpart, beeswax, also functions as a protectant, keeping moisture in and pesky irritants out, while allowing the skin to breathe by not clogging pores. Like honey, it is a great way to keep dry skin hydrated and soft.

For all these reasons - our love of honey and bees plus the “good for you” qualities - we use these ingredients a lot.

Honey

Honey is effective in soaps because the naturally high sugar content boosts the lather, which we all love. Given this, the natural instinct is to use a lot of honey in soap recipes. But beware! The downside is that the high sugar content can cause from-scratch soaps to overheat after they are poured into their mold, leading to cracks and discoloration. We can counter that by putting the soaps in a fridge or monitoring temperatures carefully. Like so many other tricks of the trade, we learned through a lot of trial and error! It is a trick to find that exact balance between using enough honey to get the soapy lather we all like and not using so much that it ruins the soap with unsightly cracks or discoloration.

Beeswax

If the amount of honey determines the amount of lather on a soap, the amount of beeswax determines the hardness of the product. The hardness allows us to create a lotion that is portable, for example, yet the heat from your hands melts the butters and oils ever so slightly each time you use it so you get a little moisture at a time. For products that require a softer feel - such as balms - we use less beeswax. We want them to be soft and spreadable. Lip balms also use less so they easily glide over your lips. Each recipe has been tested for the optimal amount to get the right result. Lots of trial and error… and eventually… our very own, from scratch recipes.

Beeswax has a high melting point of about 145°. If you overheat it, it will spit at you or scorch the wax; if you underheat it, it will fail to mix with the other ingredients. Practice makes perfect, and even when you do get it right, you are working with a very hot, sticky ingredient! Fun!

So, once we have a “good for you” ingredient that we know how to use, we get to work! Because honey and beeswax offer some unique properties that are so good for your skin, we use these ingredients in a lot of products.

We use honey in soaps because of the incredible lather…. and also in one of our bath bombs. We also use a lot of beeswax, often in conjunction with honey. For our lotion bars, such as the Lux Lotion Bars, up to one-third of the total recipe is actually beeswax! For products that require a softer feel - such as our Honey Balm, our lip balms, or our Madly Mango Cuticle Balm - we use a bit less.

Want to try some honey and beeswax products? Buy now by clicking on the pictures below!