How do you colour a lotion?

How does one colour a lotion? You can use any water or oil based colours you like. For instance, a few drops of LabColours or other liquid colours you like will work well. You can add some micas to the mix to make the lotion shiny - the more you add, the more sparkly you'll find your product. Add them in the cool down phase. You'll have to play with your dyes or micas to see how much you want to use and how colourful it will be on the user's skin.

I guess my bigger question is why do you want to colour a lotion? I understand wanting to put a little sparkle in there or turning it into a bronzer, but why make a lotion a colour other than its natural white or creamy colour? I think it's kind of neat to see the colour of the lotion change based on the oils we use.

So I guess my second part of this answer would be to change the oils or butters you're using in the lotion. The golden shea you see above will make it more yellow, the black cocoa butter would make it browner, the addition of something like green avocado butter will make it greener, and so on. (The higher the carotene levels in your oils, the yellower it will be!)

And you can use extracts to change the colour - grapeseed extract offers a bit of purple to the mix, chamomile some yellow, rosemary some brown, and so on.

And sometimes our fragrance oils can discolour our products. Take a look at the fragrance oil before you add it. If it has a yellow or orange hue, it could leave that shade in your product. And vanilla can discolour a lotion into a slightly browny colour. (You can use a vanilla stabilizer if you don't like this!)

Finally, if you see pink or green flecks in your lotion that should be white, it's very very bad - contamination - and you need to throw that out!