A couple of months ago, I decided I wanted to ditch my commercial face moisturiser and switch to something plant-based and pure and preferably DIY. I’d already been making my facial scrub and loving it so switching my moisturiser was the next logical step.
Over the years, I’d tried a number of different moisturisers and they all worked fine – I have what might be considered normal skin and don’t really suffer from break-outs so making the switch wasn’t so much a necessity from the perspective of outcomes. I just knew I wanted to simplify what I put on my skin and therefore into my body, and ditch as many potentially harmful ingredients as possible.
My latest moisturising cream contained 21 ingredients, most of which I didn’t fully understand and couldn’t pronounce and one of which was the dreaded “fragrance”, a cover word for dozens of different ingredients which a company doesn’t have to disclose. So it could have contained 30, 40, 50 ingredients for all I really knew.
For my DIY moisturiser, frankincense was my essential oil of choice. It’s one of my favourite oils and has some incredible skin-health benefits and I’d heard from a friend who had experienced great success using frankincense and helichrysum to reduce skin pigmentation. I also had some light skin pigmentation I was hoping to clear up so decided to give it a go.
At first, I was just using frankincense neat – 3-4 drops. I found this worked ok but was very strong (scent-wise) and only just provided enough coverage. If I wanted better coverage, I’d have to use more but that would start to get pretty expensive if I was using it once or twice a day and the issue remained that it was still too strong on the nose.
After a few days of neat frankincense, I started mixing 1 drop of frankincense with 4 drops of jojoba. This worked perfectly! It provided the beautiful scent and benefits of frankincense with the soothing and healing moisture benefits of jojoba and as jojoba is a fatty oil, a small amount provided substantially more coverage than just frankincense.
Contrary to popular belief, using oil on your face doesn’t make your skin more oily. Our skin absorbs the beautiful natural substances and doesn’t leave it sitting on the surface looking greasy. Within 10-20 seconds, I can actually feel that my skin has absorbed the oils and any “shine” that was there initially has disappeared.
I recommend trying this for a week or so and just mixing as you go. Bear in mind that any kind of change will take some adjustment so expect some changes to your skin and be prepared to stick with it. When you’re ready to commit, you’ll need a 30 mL pump or spray bottle. Add 30 drops of frankincense essential oil and top with jojoba oil and you’re set! It depends on how your bottle disperses the oil as to how much you’ll need but I find 2 small pumps to be sufficient to cover my face and neck.
Make sure you’re using a good quality, pure frankincense essential oil (I use and love Young Living). If you’re using a frankincense “blend” and the other ingredients aren’t listed on the bottle or your “pure” frankincense oil is dirt cheap, the chances are pretty high that it’s not pure and that it’s been manufactured using fillers and synthetic chemicals.
One of the main reasons I wanted to switch out my moisturiser was so that I could go from using a product with 21+ ingredients to a DIY with just 2 ingredients but unless we’re using good quality oils, the switch will be pointless.
