Lush DIY: Shower Jelly to Shower Gel - First Attempt

  
It was only a matter of time before I found new ways to enjoy my Lush products. Now that I have tried pretty much everything that Lush are currently offering in their shops and I'm on top of my Lush Kitchen orders, I have a little spare time to experiment and convert my favourite Lush products into other formats.

Despite making lots of shower gels using my 'bubble bar to gel' recipe,  I've had many requests to convert Lush's popular shower jelly format into its liquid counterpart. While I won't claim that this is the perfect recipe, I have experimented enough to know that this is the best one I can offer at the moment. This will successfully give you a beautiful smelling, easy to lather shower gel that will work very much like your favourite Lush shower gels. 

Video:

Review:

What you'll need:

-A Blender
-A Spoon
-An empty 250g bottle 
-A funnel 

-100g of Shower Jelly
-150g Unscented Shower Gel

-Water (optional) 

Start by breaking the jelly into pieces and placing it into the blender. You can either cut the jelly into cubes, or do as I did and rip it into pieces. It doesn't really matter how you do it - it's only to help the blender break it down and pulverise it a little quicker. 

Place the jelly into the blender and mix for a good minute. As I stated in my video, it's important that you use a food processor like the one I was using. This type of blender helps to whip and combine the ingredients without tossing them around too much. If you use a smoothie blender, you'll end up with a really foamy mixture and the consistency will be like that of a runny jelly (see the latter two pictures above!). 

Next, add in 150g of unscented shower gel. I still maintain that Calmer Solutions is the best gel I have found to date as it's relatively cheap, fairly thick and really doesn't possess any fragrance at all. Blend the mixture for a further minute or until you think it looks lovely and creamy. 

It's at this stage that you can opt to add a drop of water to the mixture, if you choose. Despite adding only 30ml of water to my gel, I found that it can impact the finished product quite a bit. My Snowman gel above is rather runny and although the scent is really strong, I have to be careful not to use too much with each shower. I also found that adding water will cause the mixture to 'drop' after a day or so. As you can see from the picture above, what started out as 250g of shower gel, quickly turned into about 150g after a day or so. 

On the other hand, my Iced Wine shower gel is much thicker in consistency and as of yet, has not begun to dispel in the bottle. This one still has the same strong fragrance and lathers up beautifully, but it doesn't have any excess water added in.  

Once it's in the bottle, it's ready to use. By this stage, the product smells beautiful and the bright shade adds to the allure. As there is not preservatives in this shower gel, I would say that a 250g bottle will last up to 7 weeks, depending on how it's stored. The shower gel shouldn't separate but you may need to give it a little shake from time to time. 

Iced Wine Shower Gel was a real success - lathering up in the shower and giving off a wonderfully strong and beautiful fragrance. Just as you would normally expect with Lush products, the scent of this stays on your skin long after you've finished showering and it's great for those who love the scents of jellies but don't necessarily get on well with the solid format. 

Snowman Shower Gel was fairly successful, although I wish it was a little thicker in consistency. While I put that down to the addition of water during the conversion process, there is a small part of me that wonders whether it's due to the fact that Snowman Jelly is a self-preserving shower jelly so it has a slightly different recipe than your usual jellies. 

Either way, I'll be making lots of jellies to gels now that I know how easy it is! My next big challenge will be converting shower gel into a jelly format!