Bath salt recipes seem pretty innocuous. They contain salt (obviously!), whether plain old Epsom salts or a more exotic salt, fragrance, maybe some glycerin or a little oil and sometimes baking soda and/or citric acid. There have been some reports that baking soda can be the cause of exploding bath salts. Read on for more information about this phenomenon:

Bath Salt Recipes - Beware of This Ingredient
By Michelle Lee Summers

Everywhere you look on the internet, bath salt recipes abound. Their simple variations are almost endless, and are a popular craft item to make at home because of this. Even children can make lovely salts with a little supervision.The ingredients are largely commonplace, and can be easily found in many grocery and drugstores. Despite their seeming simplicity, there is an ingredient that you need to add with caution to your bath salts.

Commonly, this bath product is made with Epsom or sea salts. Epsom salts are easy to obtain, available in almost any grocery or drugstore, and are very inexpensive to purchase. These salts have been used for generations to help ease aching muscles and bruising. Sea salts, depending on their origins are inexpensive to moderately expensive. You can even specialize the type of sea salt you use in your bath salt recipes; Dead Sea salt is very popular because it has properties to help soothe and heal skin conditions such as acne, eczema and psoriasis, and is even recommended by dermatologists to alleviate these conditions. Sometimes, the two types of salts are even combined in one recipe. But the salt component of the recipe is not the ingredient that you should be wary of.

Often a bit of glycerin or an oil such as jojoba oil is added to many delightful bath salt recipes to make them more moisturizing to the skin as well as to give the finished salts a nice sheen. But, these too are benign ingredients in salts for the bath. If you like to add some pleasing scents to your bath product, essential or fragrance oils can add to the relaxing or invigorating properties of the salts. Adding a scent to your product will not make them potentially dangerous, however.

So what is the bath salt recipe ingredient that can cause all the trouble? It's baking soda, believe it or not. Some bath salt recipes include it, and sometimes citric acid as well to make a fizzy product. When baking soda gets wet, it releases carbon dioxide. This is actually why baking soda is added to baked goods; it releases harmless carbon dioxide that helps baked goods rise. If your bath salts are stored in an area where dampness and humidity can affect them, the stage is set for a potential explosion, particularly if citric acid is in the mix as well.

This is why bath salts containing baking soda should never be stored in a glass container, as they can sometimes build up enough pressure from the release of carbon dioxide to shatter the glass container they are stored in, sending glass shards flying. Metal or plastic containers are best for any bath salt recipes containing baking soda.

If you have already used bath salt recipes containing baking soda, more than likely your salts will be fine--this is not a common occurrence. Its a good idea when you have added any type of liquids such as fragrances to your bath salt mixture to spread the salts on a cookie sheet and let them dry well before you package them. Just keep in mind the potential danger of making a bath product with baking soda then storing in a glass container.

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