How To Make Bath Bombs with Epsom Salt

This is a fun twist on the classic DIY bath bomb recipe.

If you’ve never made your own bath bombs before, I can not recommend it enough! It’s such an easy activity that once you’ve tried it, you’ll want to make them on repeat.

DIY bath bombs are a lot easier to make than you’d expect, and you can customize the recipe with your own scents and colors.

Just like I did with this recipe! Instead of coloring the mixture, I colored the salts. The effect turned out even better than I could have imagined!

Choose your favorite color (Pink or Blue for a Baby Shower? Red and Green for Christmas?). Add your favorite essential oils and you have the perfect homemade gift!

Or, just keep them all for yourself! Because these DIY bath bombs are the peeerfect relaxing home spa treat.

This recipe makes 1 giant bath bomb (LUSH size) or about 3 medium sized ones. You can easily double or triple the ingredients to make more.

If you like creating your own homemade beauty products at home, I highly recommend my book DIY Beauty. Inside you’ll find 100 all-natural easy recipes inspired by actual store brands and their products! 

Essential Ingredients to make Bath Bombs

To help you find the ingredients you need for this tutorial I’ve added links to suppliers. I’m part of the Amazon affiliate program so I get a small commission when you buy something via these links.

For me it’s a win-win and I spend that money to make more bath bomb tutorials for you ? But feel free to Google the ingredients to find your own or buy them from local vendors in your area!

The list below gives you a quick overview of all the ingredients you need. With just a few ingredients you can start making your own bath bombs at home. Most of the items you’ll probably already have on hand, like coconut oil, corn starch and baking soda.

The only “odd” ingredient in this list is citric acid. You can usually find it in the canning aisle at supermarkets or in the bath section of arts & crafts stores.

Your Bath Bomb Shopping List

Add the items below to your shopping list. You’ll have all the ingredients you need to start making your own bath bombs today!

Base Ingredients

You really only need 2 ingredients to make your own bath bombs.

• Citric Acid
• Baking Soda
• (And a small amount of water or witch hazel)

When you combine citric acid and baking soda in a mixing bowl, you’ll notice that nothing will happen. But that changes when you drop a mixture of citric acid and baking soda in a large amount of water. The powders will start to react with each other.

And that’s exactly how you create that iconic bath bomb fizz. To turn the powder mixture into a round bath bomb, you’ll need a small amount of liquid to make the powder clump together.

Filler Ingredients

Next up are the “filler” ingredients. These are ingredients that are not essential to create a bath bomb. However, you’ll often see them pop up in bath bomb recipes.

Corn starch is our first filler ingredient. We’ve talked about how citric acid and baking soda will want to start their fizzing reaction as soon as they come into contact with a liquid. Corn starch can help prevent this from happening too soon in the process.

The corn starch will dilute the powder mixture. This makes sure that only a larger amount of water or liquid will set off the fizzing reaction.

• Corn Starch
• Epsom Salt
• Coconut Oil (or another carrier oil)

You can use a different starch as a substitute for corn starch, like arrowroot powder. If you want to learn more about substitutes you can read this post: most common questions about bath bombs answered.

Contrary to what you might think, Epsom bath salts are not a required ingredient to make bath fizzies. But as Epsom Salt is a popular bath salt and treatment it makes sense to include it into your bath bomb recipes.

Especially in the recipe below, as the bath salts add a nice colorful and personal touch to the bath fizzies.

Another common filler ingredient is a small amount of carrier oil. The oil is a moisturizing addition to the recipe. At the same time it helps the dry ingredients stick together just a little bit better. This way you don’t have to use as much liquid.

Iconic Bath Bomb Ingredients

Now you know what ingredients you HAVE to have in your bath bomb recipe, and what ingredients are nice to have. Next, we can move on to what makes a homemade bath fizzy unique.

Colors, scents and shapes are what draw us to certain bath products.

• Liquid Colorants
• Essential Oils
• Round Molds

Let’s start with the iconic LUSH shape. When you think of their bath bombs you probably see stacks of giant round spheres scattered across their store.

It’s actually not that easy to make a giant round bath bomb. You won’t find many suppliers that sell these types of molds.

The best mold I’ve used so far is a large fillable Christmas ornament.

Fill up both sides, twist them together and hold tight with rubber bands. Once dry you should be able to wiggle the ornament open and the bath bomb should fall right out.

Equally iconic is the LUSH scent. Usually you know when a bath bomb store is near as soon as you start to smell their bath products.

The exact fragrances and ratios they use in their products are probably one of the worlds best kept secrets.

To make your homemade bath bomb smell great you can either use fragrance oils or essential oils.

The great thing about fragrance oils is that you can describe the scent you want (for example, tropical breeze or strawberries and cream) and you can search a supplier for it.

A more natural option would be to use essential oils. When you check the ingredient list of their bath products you should be able to see which essential oils LUSH uses in that product.

You will still have to figure out the ratios yourself. But checking the ingredients gives you a good idea of what direction you need to take.

You can of course also choose the essential oil scents that you like best. Lavender is a great choice for its relaxing properties and ylang-ylang has a beautifully sweet scent.

But that’s enough theory for one day. Let’s move on to the next step and make some bath bombs!

Here’s a nice printable version of a bath bomb recipe with Epsom Salt for you:

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Yield: 1 large bath bomb or 3 medium size bath bombs

DIY Bath Bombs with Epsom Salt Recipe

Active Time: 30 minutes

Additional Time: 2 hours

Total Time: 2 hours 30 minutes

Difficulty: Easy like Sunday morning

Learn how you can easily make your own bath bombs from the comfort of your own home! Making bath bombs is such an easy craft project to create your own handmade gifts, to hand out at party's, Birthday's or as a present underneath the Christmas tree.

Print

Materials

• 3 tablespoons Epsom salt (or coarse sea salt)
• 1/2 cup baking soda
• 1/4 cup cornstarch or arrowroot powder
• 1/4 cup citric acid
• 1 tablespoon coconut oil
• spraying bottle with witch hazel or water
• liquid food or soap coloring
• essential oils (optional)

Tools

• Bath bomb molds or plastic craft ornaments
• 1 large and 1 small mixing bowl

Instructions

1. Color the Epsom Salt. Divide 3 tablespoons of Epsom salt between 2 bowls. Add one drop of food or soap coloring to one bowl and add a drop of another color to the other. Add more drops for a more intense color. Stir to evenly distribute the color over the salts.
2. Let the salts sit while they soak up the dye. Divide the salts over more batches if you want to use more colors.
3. Combine dry ingredients. Put the baking soda, cornstarch and citric acid in a large mixing bowl. Whisk together with a spoon or fork.
4. This would also be the time to add your essential oils, if using. Add between 10 to 30 drops, depending on how strong you want the scent to be and how sensitive your skin is to essential oils.
5. Add coconut oil. Carefully add 1 heaping tablespoon of coconut oil (or other carrier oil) to your dry mixture. Mix all the ingredients together and make sure to smooth out all the lumps.
6. If you want you can melt the coconut oil first. This will make it easier to mix the oil with the rest of the ingredients.
7. Spritz with witch hazel. Take a handful of the mixture and squeeze it together with your fingers in the palm of your hand. The powder should clump together.
8. If it doesn't you can spritz it lightly with some water (or witch hazel) in a spraying bottle. Stir well between each spritz and make sure the mixture doesn't start to fizz in the bowl! Check regularly to see if the mixture clumps together. Once the mixture looks like slightly damp sand, it's ready.
9. Molding time. Add the colored salts to the batch. Carefully stir the salts into the mixture. I put a few salts at the bottom of my mold because, well, it looks pretty! Fill your mold one spoonful at a time. Press the mixture down firmly after each scoop.
10. Let your molds sit for a few hours or overnight. Carefully take the bath bomb out of its mold and wrap as a gift or keep for yourself!

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Enjoy!

Ina

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