Make It Merry

"One shopping trip. Forty gifts."

Most gift-making guides give you five lovely projects that between them need thirty-one ingredients, and you finish December with a cupboard full of things you bought once. Make It Merry was built backwards from that problem.

Four products — a hydrating face serum, a whipped face cream, a body balm and a lip balm — designed around one small shared shopping list of sixteen ingredients. Only two of those sixteen are used by a single product. The shea in the body balm is the same shea in the face whip and the lip balm. The jojoba runs through three of the four. That constraint is the entire design, and it is why one order makes gifts for everyone on your list.

The arithmetic

• Your first complete set costs about $124 — because you are buying ingredients, not making a product.
• Your tenth costs $4.57 in materials.
• About $155 of shopping makes ten complete four-piece sets. Forty finished gifts, roughly $15.50 a set.

Every figure is in the guide, with the package sizes and how many sets each one makes.

What's inside

• 17 pages, 7 chapters — an instant download you can read on your phone or print for the bench.
• 4 complete formulations, each balanced to 100% with every gram calculated for the batch size that fills its container: Winter Hearth Body Balm, Sugarplum Lip Balm, Frost & Dew Hydrating Serum, and the Snow Cloud Face Whip.
• Printable label templates in two sizes — a 2.5" round for jars and tins, a 1.5" round for the serum bottle, plus a lip balm tube wrap. Four holiday styles each, front and information panels, sized to OnlineLabels sheets you print at home.
• The one-afternoon running order — which product to start first and why, so all four fit in about three hours instead of taking a weekend.
• A full labeling chapter — how to write an ingredient list properly, an INCI translation table for all sixteen ingredients, and what changes the moment you sell one instead of giving it away.
• The shopping list with two columns: what one set needs, and what the same purchase actually makes.

Who it's for

Complete beginners, and anyone who wants to make a lot of gifts without a lot of shopping. If you have never made anything, start with the body balm — it is a melt, a stir and a pour, and nothing can go wrong. The face whip is the only one with real technique to it, and it is deliberately last.

It also works as a sampler. Between these four you will learn the four techniques everything else in formulating is built on: a melt-and-pour, a slurry, a preserved water-based product, and an emulsion. It is the cheapest way to find out whether you enjoy this before committing to a full guide.

What you'll need

A 0.01 g digital scale, a couple of heat-safe beakers, a saucepan for a water bath, a thermometer, a milk frother, pH strips and 70% isopropyl alcohol. Sixteen ingredients from two suppliers plus the grocery store. Packaging suggestions and sizes are inside.

The details

• Instant digital download: guide (PDF) + 5 label template files + printable previews.
• Label templates require a free Canva account; they print on any inkjet or laser printer with OnlineLabels sheets (sold separately).
• All four formulations are fragrance-optional. The only scent is sweet orange essential oil, weighed to the tenth of a percent, and it can be left out entirely.
• Water-based products are properly preserved and pH-adjusted. The two balms are anhydrous and need no preservative — the guide explains why that is chemistry, not a shortcut.
• No petrolatum, no mineral oil, no synthetic fragrance, no silicones.

This guide is for educational purposes. Always patch test, and see the disclaimer inside. Due to the instant, digital nature of this product, all sales are final.

Basically the same thing — for everyone on your list.