How To - No Soap Face Cleanser in a Jar

If you like my cleansing bar formulas, you may just love this fun little number. It's a marriage of a cleansing bar with my flower, food and dirt cleansers – except this one goes in a jar.

Hmm, Bar-in-a-jar? Flowers and bar in a jar? (we'll have to work on the name).

For this soap-free product, ayurvedic amla powder is combined with rose and a few other flowers to create a morning cleanser that not only refreshes and moisturizes the skin, but smells divine without the addition of essential oils.

The ingredients can be mixed and matched any way you please, so get ready to make your own, 100% personalized creation!

A Question of Proportion

To get the perfect texture, it is necessary to combine oils, butters and powders to achieve a soft-yet-stiff mixture that is both easy to scoop out and easily applied to the skin without drip or drag. You also want to ensure the powders and clays stay evenly distributed.

Depending on which climate (and time of year) you are in, you may want to tweak the butter/oil proportions for a stiffer or softer mix. Also, replacing a harder butter like cocoa or mango butter with a softer butter - such as shea or sal - will make a difference in texture as well.

Choose what works best for you and make skin-cleansing magic.

The LisaLise Basic Bar-in-a-Jar Formula

20% butter
30% oil
30% clay
19,2% flowers/herbs/food (see links below to flower, dirt and food cleansers for details)
0.8% preservative


Here's how I made my cleanser (100gr)
20 gr cocoa butter
15 gr castor oil
15 gr almond oil
20 gr white clay
10 gr yellow clay
19,2 gr mixed powdered rose, amla, calendula, chamomile and rhassoul
0,8 gr (18 drops) preservative

Important Formula-Creating Tip

Always measure using weight! This is the only way you can know exactly how much of each ingredient there is in your recipe. For example, oil is lighter than water, so 15 ml of oil is not the same as 15 grams of oil.

Are you worried about how to measure oils by weight? It's easy-peasy! Simply put a beaker/container on a scale and pour oil into it until the scale shows the desired weight.

Extra bonus tip: do not be tempted to leave preservative out of this recipe! Because the product is in a jar, it is undoubtedly going to come into contact with water (think scooping up product with wet fingers, etc).  It is therefore necessary to use a preservative. Broad spectrum preservative is the way to go when you are including plant materials in a formula.

 Method 

1. Place the butter in a heat-resistant beaker and melt slowly over low heat
2. Add oils and stir
3. Add the dry ingredients and preservative
4. Stir
5. Pour into a sterilized jar and refrigerate until set.
6. Enjoy

Above: Here is my first batch after a few days use. The initial batch set just a bit stiffer than I liked, so I adjusted the recipe. The second batch had the perfect texture (for me). The recipe above is for batch 2.

 No Soap? How Does that Work?

As the ingredients are basically the same, this cleanser works like my cleansing bars. Check out this FAQ about this type of soap-free cleanser and find a tutorial on how to use a soap-free cleanser at the bottom of the page.

Do Tell

If you make this cleanser - I'd love to read your feedback!

Other Cleanser How-To's on This Blog

Cleansing Bar - Basic
Cleansing Bar - Oatmeal and Pink Clay
Flowers Dirt and Food - 1
Flowers Dirt and Food - 2
Check the How-To Page for More