Bombs Away!

I am a sucker for things that smell good. I love perfumes and have a decent sized collection of indie scents (some favorites include Deconstructing Eden, Darling Clandestine, Sixteen92, and Smelly Yeti)(Note: no sponsorship here, I just really like these brands)(these parenthetical comments are getting out of control.). So I was interested when the whole bath bomb craze popped up...until I saw the prices. Uh, excuse me? You want me to spend between $5 and $10 on something I’m going let go down the drain? That isn’t even alcohol? No. No, thank you, please. There had to be another way.

And, of course, there is. Thanks to a quick internet search I learned that I could make my own bath bombs with stuff that I already had in my kitchen. It seemed like a cross between chemistry and cooking, two things I’m not super awesome at, but what the hell? Let’s give it a try.

As with so many of my projects, this one began with a tutorial. I’m not going to post it here, though, for reasons you’ll soon understand. Here’s what I used for The First Try.

In case you can’t make out the picture, despite my awesome photography skills, ingredients included baking soda, cornstarch, citric acid, coconut oil, food coloring, essential oil, and epsom salt. I’m not going to list out the quantities and the recipe because, well, it didn’t work. In fact, it was kind of a disaster.

It started out okay. I mixed all of the ingredients together, following the recipe to the letter. I dumped in some rose and patchouli essential oils, which made my kitchen smell great.  I added some blue food coloring, because blue bath bombs sounded pretty to me (and the idea of turning my bath red was a little too Game of Thrones). So far so good.

And then something went horribly awry. The final mixing step of the recipe said to add two tablespoons of water. So I did. And if you’ve ever used a bath bomb, watched Bill Nye the Science Guy, or have the most basic knowledge of chemical reactions I’ll bet you can guess what happened next.

My mixture started fizzing.

Which, cool, right? Bath bombs are supposed to fizz. That’s what they do. Only they’re supposed to fizz in the bath and not in the mixing bowl.

Nevertheless, I decided to keep going. Was it stupidity? Foolish hope? Nah. I just don’t like to leave things unfinished.

Even if they kind of look like blue tinted cottage cheese.

I had purchased a silicone ice tray at the 99 Cent store to use as molds for my bath bombs because I am nothing if not frugal (some, like my sister, might say cheap). I packed the blue-ish mixture into the tray and waited that the five minutes that the tutorial said to. This, in case you were wondering, was my second mistake:five minutes is NOT enough time for bath bombs to dry. Oh, they looked okay at first:

But they quickly started melting. At first I blamed it on the Los Angeles heat but even after reshaping them, I still had piles of melted blue...goop.

I put them in the freezer, which definitely helped with the melting issue. Of course, it also froze them. But at least they weren’t melting anymore…?

“But, Ms. Vintage Goth,” I hear you ask, “if they actually work like bath bombs are supposed to then this is all to the good, right? Lessons were learned, but things were accomplished.”

Yeah, about that. They didn’t actually work the way bath bombs are supposed to. I tried.

 No fizz.

Oh, how I did try.

Not even a little bit.

My bath smelled nice and the water turned a pretty blue, but it did not meet the bath bomb requirements. So, I did what any good tech savvy crafter would do: I asked Siri for help.

Siri’s shadiness aside, I actually did manage to find another recipe that looked doable. So I decided to give this bath bomb thing another shot.

For my second attempt, I used similar ingredients:

I also used a different tutorial, one I will recommend. Check it out on Practically Functional. I also purchased some actual dry measuring cups (thanks Amazon Prime day!) because I realised that measuring dry goods in a cup meant for liquids was perhaps not giving me the most accurate measurements.

(Do you hear that sound? That sound is my mother, scolding me from across the country for not having measuring cups for dry goods. Sorry, Mater! I have them now!)

There were a couple of slight differences in this tutorial. One being that it did not call for coconut oil. The other being that it advised adding the water and food coloring with a spray bottle as opposed to just dumping it in. This made SO MUCH difference.It turned my mixture from a lumpy vaguely blue mess to something that I could actually work with.

This tutorial also recommended drying the bombs in the molds for 24-48 hours as opposed to only a few minutes.  Talk about a game changer. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to get the bath bombs out of the molds and that I’d be stuck with an ice tray full of hardened baking products. Not at all! The bath bombs popped easily out of the tray...and they didn’t crumble or anything!

Look how pretty!

Then came the moment of truth: would my bath bombs actually fizz or would they just...bomb?

It was hard to get a good picture of what happened when I tossed them in the bathtub because they WORKED! They bubbled and fizzed just like the were supposed to. I was able to enjoy a relaxing bath and a glass of rose complete with working bath bombs that I made myself. It was the smallest of victories, but I’ll take it.

This is a project that I will gladly do again, so I hope everyone wants bath bombs for Christmas. Have you tried something like this or do you prefer to buy your bath bombs and skip the hassle? Let me know in the comments!