DIY Shimmery Body Oil Spray - Humblebee & Me (2025)

If you want to learn how to make your very own shimmery, sprayable body oils like the ones sold by Tom Ford and Anastasia Beverly Hills, you’ve come to the right place! In this post I’m sharing my free formula for sprayable DIY shimmer oils that don’t separate or settle.

The problem

Shimmery body oils were one of the very first DIYs I ever made. What could be simpler? Combine a beautiful mica with an oil you love, and voilà!

As easy as that was, I quickly found that the mica settled out of the thin oil, creating a shimmery sludge at the bottom of the bottle. Those mixtures needed to be shaken regularly, and that shimmer sludge was great at clogging spray caps.

Early attempts to thicken the oil to keep the mica suspended weren’t terribly successful. Unless I went all the way to the solid side of things and made a shimmery body butter bar, I found thickeners like beeswax and cetyl alcohol tended to settle out of the oil along with the mica, leaving a lumpy layer at the bottom of the bottle. Thickening liquid oils just alittle wasn’t as easy as I’d thought it would be.

I also learned that thickened products don’t really spray or mist. Instead, they come out of the bottle more like a blast from a squirt gun. (I learned this when I made a facial “mist” and then accidentally blasted myself in the eye with it.)

So how were the big guys like making shimmery body oil sprays when an oil thin enough to mist wouldn’t keep micas suspended, and an oil thick enough to keep micas suspended wouldn’t spray?

The sludge-preventing magic (aka the solution)

I started dissecting and comparing ingredient lists for commercially available shimmer mists and noticed a trend. They all contained some sort of thixotropic (or shear force thinning) thickening and suspending ingredient.

Examples of shear force include sliding a chair across the floor, cutting a piece of paper with scissors, and spraying a shimmery body oil.

This means products thickened with thixotropic (shear thinning) ingredients will thin out when forced through a mister or pump top, but thicken right back up once that shear force goes away!

In the world of shimmery body sprays, that means the mica will stay suspended in the thickened oil when it’s standing still, but the product will still spray when it needs to.

Thixotropic thickeners areso dang cool.

Thixotropy – What it is and why it matters in cosmetic formulations fromColin’s Beauty Pages

For our shimmery purposes, our thixotropic thickener also needs to have excellent suspending properties. You might’ve learned that hands-on way that something being thick doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll suspend insoluble ingredients well. Polybutene is a great example of this—it’s thick like honey, but can’t suspend even tiny amounts of very fine pigments.

There are several ingredients out there that offer thixotropic thickening and excellent suspending. As usual, some aren’t available to home crafters, and some are easier to use than others.

The ingredient I’m using in this formulation works really well and is easy to use; it’s Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride (and) Polyurethane-79, aka TKB Trading’s Crystal Clear Wax. In addition to thixotropic thickening and excellent suspending abilities (even at low viscosities, as with this formulation!), this ingredient also thickens oils clearly (which is pretty rare).

This isn’t an inexpensive ingredient, but you don’t need much to get the job done. I used just 0.5% in this formulation, which is about $0.13USD worth for the 50g (1.76oz) batch of shimmer oil shared in this blog post. If you purchase the 10g sample bag sold by TKB Trading, that’s enough to make 2kg (~4lbs) of this formula.

The bulk of it

With our shimmer-sludge-preventing ingredient in place, we’ve still got 99.5% of the formulation left.

As this is a shimmer oil, you probably won’t be surprised to hear that the bulk of the formulation is oil. Crystal Clear Wax works best with medium to high polarity oils, so this formulation uses a blend of two higher polarity plant oils.

The star oil—sunflower seed oil—is rich in barrier-boosting linoleic acid, making it an excellent skincare choice. It’s also cheap (booyah). Make sure you purchase regular sunflower seed oil, not the high oleic version you can buy for soap making.

Jojoba oil is the second oil, and it’s a skincare favourite for good reason—it’s a wonderful moisturizer that’s rich in vitamin E. I used golden jojoba oil, which made the finished oil quite yellow in the bottle. If you want a paler oil, use clear jojoba instead.

You can definitely play with the oil blend to customize it and use what you already have—just be sure to keep it primarily “true” liquid oils made from plants. I found Crystal Clear Wax performed quite differently when paired with high levels of Medium chain triglycerides (lumpy), C12-15 Alkyl Benzoate (blobby), and mineral oil (very thin), so if you want to experiment with different emollients, start small!

The shimmer

A shimmer oil needs shimmer, of course, and we’ll be getting that from a colourful mica.

Natural mica is a mineral that is broken up and laminated with all sorts of different colourants to create a zillion different shimmery, sparkly options. I’ve learned you can’t just use any mica for a shimmery body spray, though.

The first thing to check is how the mica was sourced. Some mica is mined in truly horrific conditions, so make sure you only purchase ethically sourced micas. This information is usually in the FAQ of a website, and if it isn’t, ask before purchasing. TKB Trading, Bramble Berry, and YellowBee all sell exclusively ethically sourced micas.

The next thing to check is the particle size of the mica. Because we want to spray this product, we need to choose a mica with really tiny particles. Larger particles are more likely to clog the misting mechanism of your bottle, and we definitely don’t want that to happen.

To check the particle size, start by looking at it. The bigger the particle, the more sparkly/glittery the mica will be. The smaller the particles, the more shimmery/glowy it’ll be.

The next place to look is at the stated particle size in the documentation (you won’t always find this, but it’s great if you can). This will be stated as a range, usually measured in micrometers (), or microns. We’re concerned with the upper end of that range.

Larger, more sparkly micas will usually go up past 100 micrometers (I’ve seen as high as 400!) while finer, more glowy ones will usually fall below 50 micrometers. Larger micas are usually made with synthetic mica (synthetic fluorophylogopite) or calcium sodium borosilicate, while the finer ones are usually made with natural (mined) mica.

The only way to really know if a mica will work in your mister is to try it, but choosing a really fine one will help a lot.

I used HiLite Copper, which has a particle size of 10–60 microns and colour shifts beautifully between silver-white and copper.

We’ll be using 1% mica in this formula. If you want to experiment with using more, know this will increase the suspending load on the Crystal Clear Wax, and could also make clogs more likely. The only way to find out if it works is to test it and see, so start small and take lots of notes.

The rest of it

The final two ingredients in this body oil are a fragrance or essential oil (to make the body oil smell amazing) and vitamin E (to help extend the shelf life of the oil by delaying rancidity).

I’m using Luxe from Stock Fragrance, which I’ve become completely obsessed with lately. I purchased it after smelling a sample at the HSCG conference in Kansas, but once it arrived I wasn’t crazy about how it smelled out of the bottle, so I didn’t use it. Then, I had a conversation with Nathan from Stock Fragrance late last year, and he explained that really potent fragrances can need dilution in order to smell really lovely. I immediately thought of Luxe, tried it in a couple formulations, and fell in love. Swoon!

You can use a different fragrance oil or essential oil, just be sure it’s safe for use at 0.7% in IFRA category 5A products.

Natural-ness

If you use a natural fragrance oil or essential oil and a natural coloured mica, this formulation is 99.85% natural. The not-natural part is the Polyurethane-79 in the Crystal Clear Wax, which is 30% Polyurethane-79 and 70% Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride.

Relevant links & further reading

• Sunflower Oilin the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Jojoba Oilin the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride (and) Polyurethane-79 (TKB’s Crystal Clear Wax)in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Coloured Micain the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Tocopherol (Vitamin E)in the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia
• Thixotropy – What it is and why it matters in cosmetic formulations fromColin’s Beauty Pages
• Other shimmery formulas:
  • Cocoa Butter Shimmer Bars
  • Summer Glow Body Oil
  • Long-Wearing Shimmer Cream Eyeshadow
• Other body oil formulas:
  • Dry Summer Body Oil
  • Argan Plum Body Oil
  • Cranberry Orange Body Oil

Shimmery Body Oil Spray

Heated phase
38.65g | 77.3% sunflower seed oil (USA / Canada / UK / NZ)
10g | 20% jojoba oil (USA / Canada)
0.25g | 0.5% Crystal Clear Wax

Post heat phase
0.5g | 1% fine mica of choice

Cool down phase
0.35g | 0.7% fragrance oil or essential oil (I used Luxe from Stock Fragrance)
0.25g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)

Combine the heated phase ingredients in something you’ll be able to heat directly. Crystal Clear Wax needs to get up to ~90°C (194°F) to melt, and that’s a tall order for a water bath.

If you don’t have beakers and alab hot plate that you can set to a reliably low(ish) temperature, you can put everything in a small saucepan and melt it on low on your stovetop. Alternatively, combine the ingredients in a heat resistant glass measuring cup, put that on a cookie sheet, and then bake it in a ~100°C (212°F) oven. No matter how you heat the mixture, make sure you keep an eye on it as you don’t want to scorch your oils!

Once you think the Crystal Clear Wax has melted, examine the mixture really closely to ensure it has—stirring around and pulling up your spoon to see if you can find any blobs. It’s so clear it vanishes into the oils even if it’s still a semi-solid blob.

When you are certain the Crystal Clear Wax has melted, remove the beaker from the heat and stir in the mica.

Stir until the mixture cools to room temperature to ensure a uniform final product.

Weigh in the cool down phase, stir to combine, and package the oil in a bottle with a spray cap.

To use, spritz over your skin and massage in. Enjoy the shimmer!

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this product does not contain any water, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the formulation, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this formulation in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams, this formulation will make 50g, which fits nicely in a 60mL (2 fl oz) bottle.
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this formulation, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the . It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list (Crystal Clear Wax!) please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• You can customize the oil blend; I recommend sticking to relatively lightweight “real” oils like sweet almond, grapeseed, or safflower oil.
  • If you want to include more delicate oils like rosehip oil, add them with the mica rather than heating them to 90°C.
• If you’d like to incorporate an essential oil, please read this.
• You can replace the fragrance with more liquid oil for an unscented product.
• I recommend keeping the vitamin E as this product is primarily made from oils that can and will oxidize (aka go rancid and start smelling disgusting).