Formula vs Recipe

Generally a recipe is considered to be a list of ingredients using kitchen measurements. When it comes to making beauty products using kitchen measures is generally not accurate and can lead to significant differences when you try to reproduce or scale up the batch(a group of similar items produced, processed or gathered together and treated as a single unit – in our case a batch may compromise a gallon of lotion) size. This is one reason I emphasize on investing on a good scale.

Trying to scale up a recipe you are usually working with fractions and complex fractions such as 5/3 cups which is 1 2/3 cups of an ingredient or those 7 tsps is 3tbs and a 1 tsp of an ingredient. Then there is the issue of drops. Depending on the dropper used the drop size can vary. Depending on how the ingredients you use settle in the measuring cup or spoon the quantity can vary. When cooking this may be acceptable but when making beauty products the results can render the final product unstable or worse.

On the other hand a formula is a list of ingredients and quantities based on a total of 100% total weight. The ingredients are weighed using a scale or balance instead of using measuring cups and spoons. The use of a scale increases your accuracy and reproducibility which in turn makes it easier to scale up from one size to another.

Scaling up only requires multiplying the desired batch size by the percentage of the formula that the ingredient compromises and then weighing that amount. The standard unit of measure used is grams.

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