What you need
1 cup baking soda
1/2 cup citric acid
1/2 cup cornstarch
1/4 cup Epsom salts
2 tbsp melted coconut oil
1/2 tsp essential oil blend desired (or strawberry flavoring oil)
2 tsp rubbing alcohol
3/4 tsp deep red mica powder
1 tbsp activated charcoal
2-4 tablespoons Halloween sprinkles blend (I used: Goodtime Sprinkle Mix)
Instructions
Tools
Instructions
Whisk together the baking soda, citric acid, cornstarch and epsom salts.
In a second bowl, combine the melted coconut oil, essential oil blend and alcohol together, mixing well.
Add liquid ingredients 1 tsp at a time to the dry ingredients, mixing it together slowly so as not to start the fizzy reaction.
Separate about 1/2 of the bath bomb mixture into a second bowl. To this bowl of bath bomb mixture, add in the red mica powder and mix well. If you want more color, add some additional mica powder in 1 tsp increments.
To the other bowl of bath bomb mixture, add in the activated charcoal powder and mix well. If you want more color, add some additional charcoal powder in 1 tsp increments.
Dust the bottom of one side of one of the bath bomb molds with cornstarch. The sprinkle side tends to come out on its own, so do not bother to dust that side with cornstarch.
Place about 1 tsp of sprinkles in the non-dusted side of the bath bomb mold.
Immediately pack the bath bomb mold with the sprinkles overly full of the red mixture. You want there to be excess mixture to help bond the two sides of the mold together.
To the cornstarch dusted half of the bath bomb mold, fill it about 1/2 full of red bath bomb mixture, then finish filling it with the black mixture, overfilling as with the other half of the bath bomb.
Press the two sides of the bath bomb mold together, grinding and pressing them to force the two together.
Allow the bath bombs to rest in the mold for up to 24 hours before gently tapping the side of the mold to release the bombs.
Use your bath bombs immediately or store in an airtight container until you’re ready to use!
I sponsor an after-school craft club and love and use many of your ideas as projects. However, last year, I had my group make bath bombs to take home, and it turned out to be a nightmare. I went to several sites to make sure I was making them correctly, and I purchased everything online.
While making the bath bombs, we realized they would not stay in a solid shape in our plastic molds, so we took the “fizzy bath salts” and put them in small mason jars. As we were finishing class, the jars started exploding off of the jars-and the ingredients crawled up and over the sides. and exploded out of the jar. (would have been quite the Halloween trick, I’m sure.)
After the first two exploded, thinking it was the air tight containers, I had the students take them out of the jars and place them into gallon baggies, which also expanded with air. It was time to send them home, so thinking it was only air, and the worst was over, I had them put the bags into their backpacks and take them home for the long holiday weekend.
When I went home, I read up on our experiment and realized that we may have used too much liquid in our bath bombs. I was terrified that the students might have exploding bags of bath salts sitting in their bathrooms at home, but only one girl came back with a story about the salts exploding in her backpack.
I have a ton of supplies to make more bath bombs-but swore to myself, that I would never repeat the process again.
First, I’m wondering if you might have a recipe we can use to create something like bath salts or body scrubs, using the same supplies that we used for the bath bombs-(the same supplies used in your bath bomb recipe), minus the offending substance-citric acid? Second, I’m wondering if this was actually my mistake-adding too much of the fluid product, or, did I maybe do something else wrong to cause the substance to explode? Is there anything else I cold have done to keep this from happening?
Thank you for your help and for listening to my story.