Ways to Use Plants in Herbal Skincare

An introduction to how to use herbs and flowers to make natural herbal skincare. Covers herbal extracts recipes using them to make creams, soap, and other skincare products. Part of the DIY Herbal Skincare series.

There are a lot of reasons why you’d want to make your own herbal skincare. Some include wanting to treat your skin as naturally as possible, saving money on beauty products, using garden herbs you already have growing, starting a business, or just as a fun weekend project. Whatever the reason, learning to use skincare herbs is a valuable and creative skill to have. Your skin will love you for it too.

This is the third part of the DIY Herbal Skincare series. The first two cover plants you can use to make beauty products and ideas for growing them. In this piece, we’ll look at how to use skincare herbs to make beauty lotions and potions.

Using Plants to Heal our Skin

Many plants have skin-beneficial properties that you can safely extract at home. These properties come from flavonoids, tannins, mucilage, antioxidants, resins, acids, proteins, and volatile oils. Depending on the plant, they can originate in flower petals, leaves, bark, roots, or stems.

Each plant has different extracts that you can exploit to make your own beauty products. Creating those extracts is the basis of this piece. Making DIY herbal skincare recipes is all about isolating those natural chemicals using simple folk methods. In most cases, this is an extra step that you take before making that recipe. For example, you can make calendula-infused oil and then use it to make body balms, lip balms, creams, salt scrubs, bath bombs, and more. The rest of this piece takes you through herbal extraction methods and herbal skincare recipes.

DIY Herbal Skincare Series

• Plants, Flowers, and Herbs for Skin Care
• Grow a Beauty & Skin Care Garden
• How to use Skin Healing Plants to Make Herbal Skincare
• Six Ways to Make Herb-Infused Oil

Using Fresh Plants and Flowers

Creating herbal extracts usually begins with picking and drying the plant material. It continues with infusing it into oil, water, or alcohol, to make the ingredients to use in beauty recipes. However, there are a few cases where you can work with fresh material from the get-go. Here are a few ideas:

• Fresh aloe vera in this Organic Aloe Skin Cream Recipe
• Calendula petals in making handmade calendula soap
• Lavender buds in this Soap-less Face Cleanser
• Herbal face masks

The Importance of Preserving Plant Material

Just like fresh veggies, herbs and flowers can go off. They can grow mold, rot, and become a magnet for microbes. It mainly has to do with the water content in the plant material, however little it may seem. It encourages bacterial growth, and unless a broad-spectrum preservative is used, your beauty products can go off too.

For example, fresh aloe vera gel is only good for 7-10 days in the refrigerator. And we’ve all seen how quickly a bunch of herbs can go brown and icky. If you make a skin cream with either and don’t use a preservative, you could have mold and bacteria growing in it within days – whether you see it or not. Safe herbal skincare means learning to preserve plants first and creating products that won’t spoil.

Drying Herbs & Flowers

One way to extend the life of skincare herbs is to dry them, then use them on the go. Once dried, plant material usually has a shelf-life of one to two years. You can use the plants during that time to infuse into oils, water, glycerin, or alcohol, to make skincare.

Harvest herbs late in the morning on a fair day. It’s then that the dew has had a chance to evaporate, and the plant’s volatile oils are at their peak. You pick flowers that open in the day and close at night, like chamomile and calendula, when they’re fully open in the afternoon.

Dry them in a food dehydrator, on a drying screen, hanging them on a rack, or in a pinch, in the oven on very low heat. If you’re using the oven method, make sure to prop the oven door open a little to let the water vapor escape. Make sure that you know which part of the plant you need and the best way of drying it. Whichever method you use, make sure that the plant material is crispy, bone dry, and at room temperature before you store it in jars or ziplock bags.

Oil vs. Water soluble

Your extraction method largely depends on the herb you’re using and what you plan to make. Many herbs, like rosemary, plantain, and calendula, happily infuse into a carrier oil. Other herbs and flowers, like rose petals, contain substances that are water-soluble. Some are both water and oil-soluble.

Water is a polarizing substance that attracts other polar substances like flavonoids, polyphenols, organic acids, sugars, and glycosides. Fatty acids, lipids, carotenoids, tocopherols, and carotenoids extract best into oil, a non-polar substance. Ethanol alcohol can extract oil-soluble and water-soluble substances, and you use alcohol to make tinctures.

Herb Infused Oils

One of the simplest ways to extract skin-beneficial properties from plants is to make a herb-infused oil. It involves infusing herbs and flowers, usually dried, in a carrier oil such as olive oil, sweet almond oil, or even coconut oil. Depending on which of these six methods you use to make it, the oil is finished between one day and four weeks. Afterward, you strain the oil out and can use it directly on the skin or to make other products. Some of the many herbs that you can infuse into oil include:

• Calendula (flower)
• Chamomile (flower)
• Comfrey (leaf)
• Lavender (flowers)
• Lemon balm (leaf)
• Plantain (leaf)
• Rosemary (leaf)
• Yarrow (leaf)

Oil-Based Herbal Skincare

The substances below are different skincare products we can use to treat and heal our skin. You can make them yourself using skincare herbs and flowers from the garden.

• Balm – a firm oil-based product that needs rubbing into the skin. The hardness comes from a moderate amount of beeswax, soy wax, or another hard oil. You make balms using liquid oils, solid oils, infused oils, waxes, and essential oils.
• Salve – Salves are oil-based products similar to balms but softer. They contain a higher percentage of liquid oils and are generally used for medicinal purposes such as this herbal healing salve.
• Cream – You make creams by blending a small amount of oil into a larger amount of water using an emulsifier. Both the oil and water content can be infused with herbs and flowers.
• Serum – concentrated plant extracts in either water or liquid oil. You apply it to your skin after cleansing but before moisturizing. Serums are liquid oil-based and may be infused with oils or have essential oils added to them

Other Herbal Skincare

• Cleanser – there are various types of cleansers, but they all do the same thing: clean the skin. Cleansers are used to remove oil, dirt, and makeup from the face and can be soap or made with other ingredients.
• Lotion –Most people think of lotions as a thin cream (above), but technically they’re a herbal water infusion used to bathe the skin.
• Rinse – typically a water infusion that you use on your skin or hair. When it dries, the water content evaporates off, leaving botanical extracts behind. Rinses can also be made with vinegar and other liquids.
• Toner – a liquid that you apply to your skin with cotton wool. Some are astringent and can remove oil and tighten skin. Some are gentler and aid in cleansing and refreshing. Many tinctures can be used as toners, as can tisanes made with astringent herbs.
• Soap – On a chemical level, soap is a salt of a fatty acid. It’s made by introducing caustic substances with oils and is used as a skin cleanser. You can add fresh herbs and flowers to cold-process soap, but it’s debatable whether herbal properties survive the soap-making process. However, you can use herbs, flowers, seeds, and roots to naturally color handmade soap.

Herb Infused oil for DIY Herbal Skincare

The easiest thing you can use infused oil for is massage oil. You can also use it in your daily beauty regime as a serum or as an ingredient to make body balms, lip balms, salves, and creams. Here are some ideas:

• Herbal Healing Salve
• Herbal Lip Balm Recipe
• Calendula skin cream
• Alkanet soap

Herbal Infusions for Skincare

The proper term for herb-infused water or herbal infusion is a tisane, but you might want to think of it as a herbal tea. They’re made as an infusion or as a decoction, and once cooled, you can use herbal water to make skin creams or other skincare recipes. You could also splash your face with a herbal tisane after cleansing and thus use it as a serum/toner.

You make water infusions in the same way that you’d make an ordinary cup of herbal tea. The only difference is that you’d use more herbal material and allow the tea to steep for longer. Often overnight. Decoctions are for tougher plant materials like roots and bark. You make a decoction by simmering the plant material in water.

As a hair rinse, rosemary tisane stimulates blood flow, combat dandruff, and help with hair loss. You use chamomile hair rinses to lighten hair gradually.  Tisanes are a great base for making skin creams or to use as gentle toners. Make your own skincare tisanes with:

• Calendula (flower)
• Chamomile (flower)
• Echinacea (all parts)
• Lavender (flower)
• Lemon balm (leaf)
• Peppermint (leaf)
• Rose (flower and hip)

Using Skincare Herbs in Soap Recipes

As a soap maker, I love using fresh and dried herbs to decorate soap. They’re also really useful in naturally coloring my bars too. Dried peppermint gradually bleeds a golden halo around every fleck. Alkanet root and gromwell root tint soap a natural purple. Poppy seeds are pretty as decoration but can also make the soap more exfoliating.

There’s some debate as to whether or not the healing qualities of plants survive the cold or hot process soap-making process. If you’d like to use an infused oil in making soap, you can add a little to melt-and-pour soap or re-batched soap. Re-batched soap is cold or hot process soap that’s been through the curing process and is ready to use. You grate it and heat it until it’s soft and gloopy. At this point, you could add a little infused oil before pouring it into molds to re-harden.

Tinctures for Skincare

Tinctures are the best way to extract the full spectrum of plant chemicals. They typically use alcohol as the liquid, and when you make them at home, the most commonly used is 80-proof vodka. It’s not exactly kind on the skin, though, and can be extremely drying. You could instead use purchased witch hazel to make skin tinctures. This common skin toner is a mixture of witch hazel extract, Hamamelis virginiana, and a small amount of ethanol alcohol.

You can make an even gentler type of tincture with vegetable glycerin. It’s a sweet and sticky substance used in formulating skincare recipes, especially creams and lotions. It’s very moisturizing and will not strip your skin.

The solvent you choose when making tinctures should be relevant to what you’re using it for. Alcohol is best for extracting essential oils, alkaloids, glycosides, acids, and bitters. Glycerin and vinegar are better at extracting other substances from your herbs.

Tinctures can pull both water and oil-soluble substances from plants, so can be one of the most effective skincare ingredients you can make. Use tinctures on their own or diluted with distilled water as skin toners to disinfect pimples and minor cuts and to mix into skin care recipes such as creams and toners. Herbalists usually recommend that you take other skincare tinctures, such as burdock root and red clover, internally.

However, thyme tincture is one that you can use for breakouts. In one interesting study, thyme has been shown to kill the bacteria responsible for pimples more effectively than over-the-counter medications. The alcohol in a tincture also helps to disinfect and to tighten pores. You can also make tinctures for use on the skin with the following:

• Calendula (flower)
• Echinacea (root)
• Thyme (leaf)
• Witch hazel (bark)