Cosmetic Chemistry

This week Tiger has been fortunate to experience life in a science laboratory setting by attending a chemistry workshop which was a good follow up to our soap-making experience last summer.

At the start of the session, the children put on lab coats, wore safety glasses, and were given instructions about lab safety.  After a brief introduction about the goals of the workshop, the children set to work to:
1) test the pH of various liquids: water, lemon juice, sodium hydroxide; and
2) witness the effects of neutralisation by adding varying amounts of liquid to one another.

Once the basics of acids and alkali were understood, the children proceeded to the highlights of the day: making the cosmestics.  First was the bath bomb.

Luckily Tiger has always been actively helping me in the kitchen, so measuring and mixing the various ingredients needed to make the bath bombs were easy steps for him.  Here is a very similar bath bomb recipe, for those who want to try this at home.

 

Making the lip balm was a similar process of measuring and mixing, except that the ingredients to make lip balm were all liquids.  I found a lip balm recipe here that is nearly identical to that which was used in the lab.

 

After a while, both products were ready to be collected:

Tiger was very excited about the experiments, especially when he saw that they resulted in products that can be applied in real life.

This post is linked up to several blog hops, where you can visit to see what other homeschoolers have been busy with.  It is also linked to the If I had a Million Dollars edition of Carnival of Homeschooling.