Cranberry fun continues today with this creamy red Frosted Cranberry Powder to Foam Facial Cleanser. It’s a soft, water-free cleanser that transforms into a gentle, foaming, lightly exfoliating cleanser when you work it up between your palms with a bit of warm water. Let’s dive in!
Cranberry Powder to Foam Cleanser
Rated 4.7 stars by 3 users
Category
Prep Time
10 minutes
Purenso® Ingredients
Directions
As the primary state of this formulation is “powder”, it’s primarily made up of powders. It’s mostly creamy white kaolin clay, with a bit of pink clay for some on-theme cranberry-ish color. we’ve used French pink clay.
The ingredient that transforms this cleanser into foamy loveliness when it gets wet is Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI. It’s wonderfully gentle and works up into a “lace glove” lather that we adore. Since it’s a solid, dry surfactant it blends in beautifully with all the clay and you wouldn’t even know it was there until you got the powder wet. Sneaky!
Weigh the powdered ingredients into a small bowl. Scatter the liquid ingredients over the surface of the powders, gently agitating the mixture to coat the drops of oil in a fine coating of powder.
This powder-to-foam cleanser includes cranberry fragrance oil and walnut shell powder, the walnut shell powder adds a touch of exfoliation; if you’d like a scrubbier action you can always increase it by a few percentage points, decreasing the kaolin clay to make room for it.
The cranberry fragrance oil adds some richness and re-fatting to the cleanser and helps weigh down the powder so it doesn’t float up into your airways too easily. For added creaminess and re-fatting we have also included a bit of rich coconut powder. You could definitely use a different powdered milk if you wanted to—cow or goat milk would also be lovely!
You will definitely need a DIY-only coffee grinder for this formulation, plus a well-fitting dust mask to protect your airways during the whippy making stage. It’s not hard—basically the DIY equivalent of a smoothie. Pop everything in your coffee grinder and blend until smooth. Voila!
Dump the mixture into your DIY-only coffee grinder and blend thoroughly. You’ll want to smack the lid of the grinder with the back of a spoon to knock powders down from the inside of the lid. You’ll also want to take the lid off at least once and stir around, taking care to turn over everything at the bottom of the grinder to ensure all the ingredients are blending together well.
Once the mixture is uniform, all that’s left is packaging up the cleanser.
To use: dispense about 1/4–1/2 tsp of the powder cleanser into your palm. Add a bit of water and work it up into a lather; from there, use it as you’d use any foaming facial cleanser. Enjoy!
Recipe Note
Because this product does not contain any water, it does not require a broad spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.
Substitutions:
· You can use more white kaolin clay instead of the pink clay.
· Your Sodium Cocoyl Isethionate (SCI) can be any format—sticks/needles, finely powdered, or chunky powder. After it goes through the coffee grinder it’ll be a fine powder no matter how it started.
· SLSa would be our first choice for an alternative. Whatever you use, it MUST be dry—no liquid surfactants here!
· You could try a different plant-derived exfoliate, like apricot kernel or cranberry seeds, instead of the walnut shell powder. Since we’re grinding this formulation you can choose a scrubbier exfoliants than you’d usually use on your face, though we do recommend keeping the usage level to 2% to start with.
· You can substitute another lightweight oil like sweet almond, grapeseed, or sunflower seed .