If you think about making your own spa products - such as lotions, body washes, and exfoliating scrubs - you probably think it sounds difficult. It probably brings to mind lots of weird ingredients, chemicals, and slaving away over a hot vat of goo for hours. After this article, you'll know that nothing could be further from the truth!

In fact, using my method (which I call The Easy Way), making your own bath and body products takes less time than going to the mall, and you get twice the quality of skin care.

There are two ways to make your own bath and body products - The Hard Way, and The Easy Way. The Hard Way means investing a lot of time in books and trial-and-error in your kitchen, and a lot of money in ingredients. Often, you need patience and perseverance as you attempt to make a basic lotion or liquid soap, but it doesn't come out as well as you'd hoped. Heck, you don't even get to the fun part, which is adding the scent and color!

The Hard Way is what is taught in soapmaking classes, websites, and books. It can be fun and rewarding because of the natural ingredients and the high-quality products that result. Shea butter lotions... aloe body washes... If you are prepared to invest the time and money, and you have a lot of patience, The Hard Way does pay off. You get wonderfully moisturizing products in your favorite fragrances - even hard to find ones - that are much better than Bath and Body Works.

The problem is, The Hard Way is often incredibly discouraging to beginners. As they pour their failed body wash down the bathtub drain, most beginners start to wonder if it's really worth the trouble. Sooner or later, they go back to the mall and pay too much for what is essentially drugstore-quality products in fancy bottles and scents.

The Easy Way of making bath and body products is, well, easy! With The Easy Way, you get all the benefits - the natural ingredients, the high-quality skin care products, and your favorite scents - for only 10% the work. The Hard Way is like baking a fancy Julia Child cake recipe, but The Easy Way is more like making a cake mix.

The Easy Way uses professional unscented product bases (also called "cosmetic bases") that are specially manufactured for this purpose. These bases are made with natural ingredients, such as shea butter, avocado oil, aloe, and goats' milk, so you still get high quality skin care, the same as if you had made the bases yourself with The Hard Way.

You can get unscented bases for almost any liquid product you can think of: body lotion, massage cream, bath oil, shower gel, bubble bath, salon-quality shampoo and conditioner, body scrub, hand soap, and face wash.

To these basic products, you add your own fragrance, color, and other special ingredients, such as silk proteins and botanical extracts. You can even experiment with natural anti-aging ingredients such as carrot seed oil, green tea extract, and collagen. These ingredients are what makes your products unique!

If you compare three bottles of shower gel from Bath and Body Works, The Body Shop, and Origins, you will see a lot of similarities in their first few ingredients. That's because they're all taking a basic body wash and making their own improvements on it, just like you can with The Easy Way.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel (or a basic body wash.) If what you want is to quickly and easily create your own high-quality spa products, The Easy Way is the method for you!

Katherine Durkes is an experienced teacher of bath and body. She runs a popular website on how to make bath and body products with articles and e-books, as well as the Yahoo Group “Home Bath & Body.” Her first e-book, “The Fast Guide To Making Bath Bombs (& Fizzies)” has over 10,000 downloads and has been featured on About.com and in Ready Made Magazine.

To find out more about The Easy Way of making products, you can request a quick 8-page PDF about The Easy Way with a recipe and photos. Just send a blank email to productreport@excellentlivingguide.com, and it will be emailed to your inbox. You must be able to receive attachments over 1MB (it's 1.1MB.)