NYC’s first beauty farm!
For this Valentine’s Day, Brooklyn Rooftop Botanicals, NYC’s first beauty rooftop farm, decided to create the perfect homemade Valentine’s Day gift—for yourself or a surprise for your significant other! This lickable massage bar has a creamy texture that allows your hands to glide over skin for long lasting massages.
Massage bars are also called lotion bars, so if you want to ditch body creams and lotions and all its packaging to be more eco-friendly, this might be the way to go. And as an added bonus, you can customize it to how you like it each time instead of settling.
Liana Blomquist, CEO and founder of Brooklyn Rooftop Botanicals, explains more of the ingredients in detail:
“Our massage/lotion bar is full of skin-loving ingredients like coconut oil, cocoa butter, and beeswax. Coconut oil allows the bar to glide and melt easily while cocoa butter is rich in fatty acids which can help dry, chapped skin. It also helps to increase skin elasticity due to its deeply moisturizing properties. We’ve also added vitamin E oil for its antioxidant properties, and to lengthen the bar’s shelf life,” says Liana.
Beeswax is an ingredient that you should always keep handy! It has strong antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. Its chemical structure contains flavonoids, which are helpful to skin health. Chrysin is the flavonoid responsible for relieving inflammation and has antimicrobial and regenerative effects.
Sterols also have regenerative effects on the skin which is helpful for wound healing. This explains why beeswax has been used for centuries in skin care. And finally, flavor oil; this is what gives our massage bar its… festivity. You can pick any flavor oil you want or none at all. I’m using my own vanilla oil but you can also buy this vanilla flavor oil from Nature’s Garden Candles. They have a wide selection of oils to pick whatever suits your preferences.
DIRECTIONS:
- Add all of your oils and waxes together and heat until melted. I like to do this on the stove in a hot water bath so my oils can melt down gently and keep their integrity.
- Stir everything together and add in your flavor oil when the mixture is slightly cooled and you can touch the container without burning your hand.
- Pour into your mold and let it harden. You can have fun with this and look up heart shaped silicone molds or any other shapes you’d like.
- Pop them out and wrap them up with a coffee filter or, again, look around at what you can reuse as a container!
About Brooklyn Rooftop Botanicals
New York City’s first and only rooftop beauty farm, Brooklyn Rooftop Botanicals, spans over three rooftops. They grow and process botanicals on Brooklyn rooftops to create extracts and beauty products. They do this with the aim to help change the way raw materials are sourced to combat climate change and to help people think more consciously when it comes to their beauty consumption habits.
About Liana Blomquist
BRB was founded by certified horticulturist, Liana Blomquist, in 2019. The brand was born out of her passion for gardening and beauty, while re-evaluating her consumption habits and the way that they affect the planet. Liana’s career spans over 10 years at Elizabeth Arden and Revlon as a Global Marketing and Product Development Executive in their fragrance and skincare categories. Over the span of her time there, she launched over 30 fragrance and skincare products winning global awards and nominations from key publications and foundations. Her sustainable beauty and gardening expertise has been seen in NY Post, Thrive Global, NY Live,NY Magazine and Real Simple.
To learn more about Liana, her farm, and her process, please visit brooklynrooftopbotanicals.com.
Edited by Brianne Oliva
