Essential oil bath salts are one of the easiest natural beauty items to make. They’re great to share with others too. You can create your own custom essential oil bath salts to give as gifts, or make handy little kits so that your friends and family members can create their own custom bath salts. In this article we’ll go over bath salt basics, as well as some tips for more professional bath salts.

The basic bath salt recipe is a great place to start, and is the most affordable recipe. Then we’ll talk about bath salt ‘upgrades’ that you can add.

Bath Salt Upgrades

The following ingredients are nice extras for making better quality bath salts. You use these in place of the ingredients in the basic bath salt recipe in whatever portions you like to add a professional touch to your bath salts.

Or skip ahead to the ‘Best Bath Salts Recipe’ to see how all of these premium ingredients can be combined to make great quality bath salts.

Dead Sea Salt

Dead sea salt is a bit pricey compared to epsom salt, so you might only want to replace part of the salt in your recipe with dead sea salt. It adds some nice texture and slight color, as well as added minerals, which are believed to create more therapeutic salt baths. Usually you can find various grades, from fine to course. You might try a mixture of grades to make more interesting textures and aesthetic looks.

Baking Soda, Table Salt or Dendritic Salt

If your bath salts turn out too clumpy or oily, or lose their aroma too quickly, try adding 3/4 cup to 1 cup of either baking soda, table salt or dendritic salt to the recipe above. Baking soda and table salt work at about the same strength and have similar effects: they help keep your bath salts dry so they easily pour out of the container. The advantage of using dendritic salt is that it is even more absorbent than either baking soda or table salt. It has a bit of a finer texture as well.

Fizzy Bath Salts

You can make a fizzy powder by combining 1 part citric acid with 2 part baking soda. Experiment with how much of this mixture to add to your natural bath salts recipe. I’ve included amounts I use in the ‘Best Bath Salt Recipe‘ below.

Use Multiple Salt Grains

Mixing up different types of salt and different coarseness-es makes the most interesting bath salts. My favorite bath salt mixtures contain epsom salt, sea salt, and coarse dead sea salt, as well as baking soda. Combined, these grains create an interesting texture and are more pleasing to the eye.

This is the recipe for bath salts that I’ve found to work the best and provide additional moisturizing while not being an oil bath salt:

Where to Buy Bath Salt Supplies

After making these for several years, I’ve had my share of online shopping experiences, looking for the best quality and prices. There are many good natural ingredients stores, but my favorites are Liberty Natural and Mountain Rose Herbs. You can get all the ingredients listed in this article from either of these stores. Note, Mountain Rose Herbs has a unique variety of salts as well as nice large mouth glass jars and cobalt blue glass jars if you’re looking for something other than baggies to put your bath salts in. Liberty Natural has plastic tubs.