Natural Calendula Lotion Recipe

Use natural ingredients to make this step-by-step calendula lotion recipe. This natural skin cream has skin-soothing properties from calendula flowers, nourishing honey, and sweet-scented rose hydrosol. The recipe includes full instructions and a DIY video, along with explanations of each ingredient.

If there’s one skincare plant that I can recommend for all skin types, it’s calendula. Many people grow it as a companion plant, edible flower, or to use in medicinal preparations, but it’s also amazing for your skin. Especially in this simple calendula lotion recipe. The resins in the petals and entire flower heads are rich in compounds that promote healing, soothe discomfort, and infuse your skin with antioxidants. It’s the perfect ingredient to add to a nourishing and soothing daily skin lotion. One that you can smooth over your entire body and that helps treat rough patches and calm inflammation.

Making this calendula skin cream recipe begins with organic calendula flowers. You first infuse them in a carrier oil, then blend the oil with other ingredients to create a true and stable emulsion. It’s a medium-thick skin cream that’s wonderful for dry skin and ideal for hands and body. At the average beauty counter, you’ll pay a hefty premium for calendula lotion, but it’s relatively easy and inexpensive to make yourself.

Calendula Lotion Ingredients

I’ve chosen the ingredients in this calendula skin cream recipe to soothe irritated skin, moisturize, and promote healing. Calendula is an incredible skin herb that speeds up skin healing and soothes irritation. It’s also used in salves and ointments as a remedy for scrapes, bruises, and even bug bites.

The oil used to make calendula oil will have different properties based on the particular oil you use. Regardless, the oil will add conditioning, vitamins, and nourishment. I prefer working with lighter oils when making general-purpose skin cream recipes, just because it feels better on my skin and absorbs quicker. I recommend sweet almond oil, grapeseed oil, or apricot kernel oil for this recipe, though you could use another. For a thicker cream, I recommend avocado oil, olive oil, fractionated coconut oil, or jojoba oil.

Rose Hydrosol and Honey

Lotions and creams are a mixture mainly made up of water or a water-based liquid mixed with oil and other ingredients. It’s the water in lotions that hydrates your skin, be that in the form of distilled water, aloe vera juice, herbal teas, or floral waters. The water-based liquid in this calendula lotion recipe is rose hydrosol. It’s a rose-scented natural ingredient made by distilling rose petals. Not only does it smell beautiful, but it calms inflammation, firms the skin, and promotes hydration. Most I’ve included in the water phase, but there’s about a teaspoon of it added in the cool-down phase, too. This compensates for any lost to evaporation during heating.

For even more moisture, I’ve added a natural humectant – honey. It draws moisture to your skin and locks it in. Honey also has additional skin healing properties, and don’t worry, the skin cream won’t be sticky. If you’re Vegan, you can substitute it with vegetable glycerine, which has similar properties. You can also leave this ingredient category out if you don’t want to use either honey or vegetable glycerine. I don’t consider it an optional ingredient, but the formulation will still work if it’s not included.

Homemade Calendula Infused Oil

The foundation of this calendula lotion recipe is a simple carrier oil infused with dried calendula flowers. The oil part of calendula oil will act as the emollient or conditioning agent in your lotion, but it also extracts and carries the active ingredients from calendula flowers. Though you can buy calendula oil ready-made, it’s very easy to make it, and you can do it at any time of the year! There’s a quick method that you can use that gives you homemade calendula oil in hours or a traditional method that takes several weeks.

Most of the time, you’ll never know which variety of calendula flower you get when you buy calendula. Not once have I ever seen this information listed. However, if you grow calendula, you’ll know exactly which type it is and how it was grown. For skincare recipes, I recommend growing medicinal-grade calendula flowers such as Erfurter Orangefarbige or Resina, then harvesting and fully drying them out. Dried flowers make powerful calendula oil that’s great for formulations treating everything from wounds and eczema to diaper rashes.

Using Fresh Calendula Flowers

Inevitably, I get a question from someone about making calendula oil with fresh flowers. I don’t recommend it because fresh flowers contain quite a bit of moisture. That tiny amount can contribute towards causing early rancidity (oxidization) in the finished calendula oil, leading to an off-putting scent and much-reduced shelf life. Fresh flowers also mold over if they’re allowed to float to the surface of the oil, and calendula oil made with fresh flowers is not safe for lip products. However small the chance, it is possible that botulism can grow in oil infused with fresh flowers or herbs.

Emulsifier for Calendula Lotion

When you scroll further down, you’ll notice that there’s a good amount of water and oil included in the recipe. As anyone who’s made salad dressing can attest, oil and water don’t mix together very well at all! They instantly separate. To hold them together in calendula lotion, we use a skincare ingredient called emulsifying wax. The type included is called emulsifying wax BP, but you can use the NF version interchangeably. This ingredient is stable and reliable and helps to create emulsions that you can depend on.

Though there are a great many lotion recipes online that call for beeswax as an emulsifier, please be aware that it can fail. Beeswax used to be mixed with borax in the past to create stable emulsions, but borax has since been deemed unsafe for the skin. On its own, beeswax is not an emulsifier, and though it can mimic one initially, the emulsion may separate, especially if there’s a fluctuation in temperature. You also need a high-shear mechanism, such as an immersion blender, to bind it to water at all.

I’m a natural soapmaker and prefer using natural ingredients in skincare, too, but in this case, I’m an advocate for formulated emulsifiers. Though beeswax is completely natural, I don’t trust it to keep my lotions and creams held together. In formulations, you can use it as a thickener and stabilizer, though.

Lotion Preservatives

Any preparation that has water in it, especially with fats and nutrients in it, will spoil quickly. That includes food like yogurt or cooked meals. Once we open the container, we can keep it in the refrigerator for a few days, a week maybe, but inevitably, it begins to grow mold and bacteria. The same thing happens with skin creams.

Without a preservative, homemade calendula lotion lasts a day at room temperature and, at most, a week in the refrigerator. That’s why I include a broad-spectrum preservative in the ingredients list. I use a product called Geogard Ultra for all of my skin creams, and I recommend it to you, too. It’s certified for organic skincare and works well. Add it to your recipe, and you can enjoy a safe room-temperature shelf-life of up to eighteen months. Geogard Ultra and a few other preservatives are made from naturally derived ingredients. I would not classify it as a “natural preservative,” though.

I’ve yet to come across “natural preservatives” that actually work in skin creams. Some that are touted as preservatives, such as grapefruit seed extract and vitamin E oil, do not kill microbes or pathogens in any way. They are weak antioxidants that have traditionally been added to skincare recipes and soap to help stop oils from going rancid too early. They don’t usually work in that capacity, either. Essential oils, lemon juice, and citric acid in lotions have no preservation powers either.

More Calendula Recipes

We’ll only need a small amount of calendula oil in this calendula lotion recipe. However, it’s worth making quite a large batch at a time, especially if you choose to infuse it without heat. That’s because it takes weeks to make, and it can have quite a long shelf life. It all comes down to the freshness of ingredients, though. If the carrier oil you use to make calendula oil has a long shelf life, then your finished calendula oil will have the same best-by date. So make a decent-sized batch to make calendula lotion and other homemade skincare products. I offer a printable guide to making calendula skincare, including soap, facial cleansers, lip balm, bath salts, salve, and lotion.

• Calendula Soap Recipe
• Healing Herbal Salve Recipe
• Herbal Lip Balm Recipe
• Calendula Skincare Ebook (many calendula recipes)