Making a Bath & Body recipe with Ellie
Bath & Body covers five different products, so the wizard opens by asking which one you're making — then builds that recipe from your own shelf, with the safety gates each product needs.
Resin and candles each make one kind of thing. Bath & Body makes five, and they have almost nothing in common chemically — a cold-process bar needs lye and weeks of cure, a bath bomb needs neither. So the Bath & Body wizard opens with a question the other crafts never ask.
Open it from Ellie Wizard in your Bath & Body workspace (or the /ellie route while Bath & Body is your active craft).
What are you making?
The front door is five tiles. Whichever you pick decides the whole rest of the flow — the steps, the pantry shelves Ellie reads, and which safety gate stands between you and Save.
| Tile | What it is | Guide |
|---|---|---|
| Melt & Pour Soap | "Melt a pre-made base, no lye math" | Melt & Pour |
| From-Scratch Soap | "Cold process, hot process, or liquid — you choose the oils" | From scratch |
| Bath Bomb | "Fizzy molded bath bombs — dry mix, scent, and color" | Bath bombs |
| Scrub | "Sugar or salt body scrub — oil, exfoliant, and scent" | Scrubs |
| Lotion / Butter | "Water + oil phases, emulsified and preserved" | Lotions and butters |
You get the same five tiles when you enter a recipe by hand — deliberately, so "Bath Bomb" never means one thing in the wizard and something else on the manual form. See Entering a Bath & Body recipe by hand.
Then Ellie builds it from your shelf
Describe what you want — a scent direction, a mood, who it's for — and Ellie proposes a recipe grounded in what your pantry actually holds. What she picks depends on the product:
- An oil blend (from-scratch) or a base (Melt & Pour), from your own Bath & Body pantry.
- A scent — fragrance oils, essential oils, or a blend of both, at a load that suits the method. See Scenting a Bath & Body recipe.
- A colorant, if you're coloring it — and on a cold-process bar, a design to put it in: plain, layered, or one of three swirls. Pick one and the wizard divides the batter into parts, asks which colour goes in each, and works out how much batter each part takes. See Bath & Body wizard modes for what each mode lets you set.
- Add-ins from your Bath Ingredients shelf — clays, botanicals, oats, salt.
- Steps in the order you actually work them.
If your shelf can't support the product, Ellie says so at the front rather than inventing an ingredient: a From-Scratch recipe with no oils on the shelf, or a Melt & Pour with no base, gets a short note and a link straight to the shelf that's empty.
How hands-on Ellie is
From-Scratch and Lotion are tiered — Guided, Collab and Advisor, the same three modes as the other crafts. On a From-Scratch bar the mode also decides how much of the design you set yourself: Guided offers three chips and pins the rest, Collab adds the swirl kind and the number of parts, and Advisor adds the per-part share of the batter. Melt & Pour, Bath Bomb and Scrub are flat: they have no lye math to scale guidance for, so they run as a short fixed set of steps at every experience level. See Bath & Body wizard modes.
The safety gates, and which door each one sits at
Two of the five products carry a safety step that is not skippable at any tier — but they don't both land at Save, and it's worth knowing which is which:
- From-Scratch (Cold Process, Hot Process, Liquid) shows the lye acknowledgment with your batch's computed lye and water weights before Save. That one is a save gate: the wizard won't save until you acknowledge. Read Working safely with lye before your first one.
- Lotion is gated at the batch, not at the save. The wizard computes the minimum preservative weight from the preservative you actually stocked and shows it on the recipe — but a lotion with no usable preservative still saves. What it can't do is run: Start a Batch refuses it — "This lotion has no preservative selected — it can't be made as a batch until you add one to the recipe" — and so does completing one, which additionally asks for the finished batch's measured pH before it will close. Read Preserving water-based batches safely. Entering a lotion by hand is the one place the preservative is a save gate — the manual lotion form names what's missing beside the picker and refuses the save until you fix it.
Melt & Pour and bath bombs pass neither gate, because neither risk is present — M&P starts from a base that is already saponified, and a bath bomb carries no water for microbes to grow in. An anhydrous scrub is in the same position; an emulsified scrub is not, and the same batch-time preservative refusal applies to it for the same reason it applies to a lotion.
Heads up: the lye numbers Ellie shows you are computed in code from each oil's SAP value and your superfat, never written by the model — but they are still a starting point you check yourself. That rule is the whole of Working safely with lye; read it once, properly.
Refining and saving
Every recipe comes back as a preview you can push on in plain language — "less coconut", "make it unscented", "size it for my loaf mold" — and Ellie re-works the recipe around the change. When it looks right, save it to your Bath & Body library.
From there you can read it in full (Reading a Bath & Body recipe), change it (Changing a saved recipe), or start a batch (Running a Bath & Body batch).