By Daisy Luther
The season to be sick is upon us, and you may be looking for a natural cold and flu remedy to relieve congestion. You won’t believe how easy it is to make an all-natural shower bomb without any of the toxic ingredients in the store-bought products. It’s also a fraction of the cost to make your own – Amazon sells the same thing at $20 plus shipping for a package of 12 tablets.
If you have a fork and a muffin tin (or even a cookie sheet), you have all of the tools you need to make your own shower bombs. You aren’t limited to making these to treat congestion, either. With a different set of essential oils, you can make any fragrance you want to turn your shower into a posh spa experience.
About essential oils
I have a love-hate relationship with essential oils. I’ve always used them to scent my homemade products because it seems ridiculous to go to all the work of making a lovely non-toxic product and then add a petroleum or chemical fragrance to it. The hate part comes in with all of these multi-level marketing companies that endorse some pretty terrifying and unsafe medicinal uses for essential oils. For example, they should never be applied undiluted directly on your skin and it’s very questionable to ingest them. Please use great care and be certain the person you are taking advice from has actually had some training other than a three-day weekend convention geared to teach people how to sell oils.
Because we’re breaking free from shopping at the stores, I decided it was time to take the plunge and find an essential oil company that I have faith in. I’m very happy with Spark Naturals. The quality is high, there’s no big push for me to get others to sell them, and the website contains no outrageous claims or unsafe advice. These are the oils I recommend to you as well. (Use the coupon code DAISY for your orders and get 10% off, every single time.)
To make your own cold-relief shower bombs, you need the following:
- 1 cup of baking soda
- 2 tbsp of salt
- Essential oils of choice ( I used a combination of eucalyptus and peppermint)
- 1/3 cup of lemon juice
- Water as needed
- Muffin tin ( a mini muffin tin would make the best looking end product)
How to Make a Shower Bomb
1.) Using a glass mixing bowl, stir baking soda and salt with a fork.
2.) Add the lemon juice a little at a time. It will get fizzy when the acid reacts with the baking soda.
3.) Stir again with the fork.
4.) Add water a few tablespoons-full at a time until you have a consistency that looks like biscuit dough – moist and crumbly, like in the photo below. It has to be moist enough that it will stick together.
5.) Lightly oil your muffin tin or cookie sheet so your dough doesn’t stick. I use a less expensive vegetable oil for this, but you could use coconut or almond oil if you want to.
6.) Roll the dough (I use about a tablespoon at a time) in your hands, then add the ball of dough to your muffin tin or cookie sheet.
6.) If you want, you can go all Martha Stewart and try to make them look perfect, pressing them down into the cups of the muffin tin or using a cookie cutter. I am not Martha Stewart and prefer to say that mine look “homespun.” That’s code for I-didn’t-press-them-down-neatly-or-use-a-cookie-cutter.
7.) Bake them for 10-20 minutes at 350 degrees. When they come out, they’ll look sort of like cookies, which prompted my daughter to rename them “shower cookies.” Cookies are better than bombs, right?
8.) Gently remove them from the muffin tin with a spoon and place them on a plate to cool.
9.) While they’re cooling, add 3 drops of Eucalyptus oil and 1 drop of Peppermint oil to each shower bomb.
10.) Leave them out overnight to cool and harden.
Place the dried shower bombs in a canning jar. The longer they sit in the jar, the stronger and more soothing they’ll become.
If they are crumbly, don’t worry – they’ll still work just fine. Try adding a bit more liquid the next time you make them. In fact, if they crumble too much, use a fork to turn them into a powder and scoop out about 2 tbsp. into a little dish to place in your steamy shower.
How to Use a Eucalyptus Shower Bomb
To use a shower bomb, simply toss it onto the floor of your nice hot shower. The steam will create a fragrant vapor that will clear your sinuses and provide some natural relief for congestions. If you’d prefer a bath, you can add this to your bathwater instead – it’s just baking soda, salt, and oils, after all.
What’s your favorite natural cold and flu remedy to alleviate congestion? Please share it in the comments below.
Resources:
Spark Naturals essential oils (Coupon code: DAISY will get you 10% off your order)
Eucalyptus essential oil
Peppermint essential oil
What about you? Do you have a stuffy nose? Have you tried shower bombs?
You do realize that if you omit the essential oils these are perfect for dishwasher tabs? ……right?
Awesome recipe!
Flexible and functional!
I throw a little bit of soap in my dishwasher tablets 🙂
Hi Daisy,
I just wonder whether we miss something here.
What I’m saying is the actual shower (or bath) bombs actually work almost like real ones, creating this fizzy tornadoes and such. But in this case we create this very chemical reaction BEFORE taking a bath, so this bubbles and stuff happen in the bowl. So what of the bomb actually stays in your cookie? Does that do anything except just dissolving? I honestly thought that this bomb stuff was essential to the product and the process, because without it we just could sniff these vapors from a glass of hot water and a coule of drops of essential oils, even without taking a shower. (
You know what I’m saying?
Nope, the whole purpose of this is a nice steamy therapeutic shower. The cookies get stronger the longer they sit in the jar, and if you wanted to, you could wrap them up pretty and give them as gifts. It’s absolutely not necessary to put it in cookie form, but it’s a nice knock off of the store bought shower vapor tablets. 🙂
I have used eucaliptus oil in steamers for years. This sounds wonderfull. Thanks for the recipy. It will make great Xmas gifts.
Symptom relief isn’t a bad thing. But if you have a cold you need to knock out the source. I suggest keeping a supply of Lomatium on hand. We have used it for years to CURE colds, bronchitis, even shingles and diverticulitis. It’s been used for centuries by native Americans and kept them alive during the early 20th century flu epidemic. Their results were so dramatic that doctors who knew of their success started to use Lomatium as well. It’s also safe for animals. My dog had a skin infection and keeping topical treatments and a bandage on the wound was impractical. I added a few drops of Lomatium to her water and the infection cleared in day. Lomatium is a great gift from God that every home should have on hand.
What exactly is Lomatium? I’ve never heard of it before and would love to learn more. 🙂
WOW! Thanks Suzi. I just Google that herb as I had never heard of it before. It sounds incredible. I have to get some for my herbal stash.
Suzi,
where do you purchase your lomatium from? I assume it is a tincture.
let me know at [email protected]
Hi Daisy, I want to make these — what is the yield/count given what size (1 inch round or whatever). Thanks!
I came up with about 12 1 tbsp rounds.
OOPs – I added the essential oils before baking…well the house smells awesome..guess will re-add after they come out of oven…
I used to buy my oils at Spark Naturals, but I want the GC/MS reports to show the oils are unadulterated. SN wouldn’t provide them. I’ve found a supplier in Aromatics.com … the GC/MS reports are available even before buying the oils. Why do I want those reports? It’s the science behind the oils … the proof what I’m buying is what is claimed. I also found SN was lacking certain oils that are standard to an aromatherapist.