Camp Mom: Summer Bath Bomb Making

It’s the first official day of summer vacation.

We have some travel planned later in the summer but nothing for the first two weeks. My daughter injured her knee about a month ago so the soccer camps with all of her teammates are out while her knee is still recovering.

She has been pretty bored and we don’t want her to be on screens the whole summer so while I was thinking about what we could do, she walked in the kitchen and asked if she could make bath bombs. We did this a few weeks ago and it turned out really great. So, she got everything out and made a 2nd batch.

Here’s the recipe:

Baking sheet covered with plastic wrap to store bath bombs until they are dry (at least 24 — 48 hours).

1 cup baking soda

1/2 cup citric acid

1/2 cup epsom salts

1/2 cup corn starch

1 Tbs oil (we used this fractionated coconut oil but you can use any type of oil, mineral, coconut, or olive oil are good choices.)

1 Tbs water.

A few drops of your favorite liquid food coloring (we used this)

7-10 drops of essential oils for scent. I use both DoTerra Essential Oils and Revive Essential Oils. DoTerra is quite expensive but worth it as they are very high quality, long lasting, and can be used for many things but that would be a whole other blog post… If that is not in your budget, Revive is a very good option. I have been experimenting with both and I have been pretty happy with both brands, maybe more so with Revive because they are more economical.

Bath bomb moulds. We recommend and used this one.

Here’s our ingredients and utensils laid out.

Whisk all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Use a whisk, or a fork, or your hands if you don’t mind getting messy and break up all the little chunks, so you have a smooth powdery consistency.

Then, in a small jar, for the wet ingredients, add:

1 Tbs water

1 Tbs mineral oil or fractionated coconut oil. (this is the only ingredient that is not in the picture above);

1 tsp of essential oil.

A few drops of food coloring.

Place the lid on the jar and shake it well.

Slowly add the wet ingredients to the dry mix. Adding a little at a time and then mixing. The mixture will start to foam slightly which is the chemical reaction between the citric acid and the baking soda with water added. If you do it slow enough, and with this small amount of water, you should end up with a somewhat dry, almost fluffy powdery mix, something like this:

Over stuff the bath bomb moulds and press together tightly.

If it comes out correctly, when you open the mould, you’ll have a bath bomb. If there was not enough raw material inside of the mould, then it will fall apart in your hands when you open it — like this:

Maybe you can learn from our mistakes! The big oops!!!

The first time we tried this, we made a different big mistake and added way too much water. The recipe we used did not specify the exact amount of water, so we were guessing as to how moist the mixture had to be in order to stick together inside the mould — the description we read was “like wet sand.” But the description that worked for us was more like slightly damp extremely fluffy sand.

In the recipe that worked for us, we added all of the dry ingredients together and then slowly added the small amount of wet ingredients we had. In the recipe that totally BOMBED (pun intended hahaha) we kept the citric acid out of the dry ingredients and then added the citric acid after adding way too much water to the dry ingredients. When we added the citric acid, there was a huge reaction and the whole thing was a foaming, frothy, definitely fun to play with liquid but there was no way that it was becoming a bath bomb. It was like the bath bomb had already exploded. This is what it looked like:

I hope you do not make this mistake, though it was fun, it took a lot of cleanup. Here is what our final product looked like when we did it right:

We had a lot of fun working on this and will definitely do this again and I hope you will try it!

-Gwen