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Pampering Your Skin With Elderflowers By Sarah Head

When summer brings a profusion of elderflower it is easy to use them to make treats to eat and drink for other people. Elder also gives us the opportunity to think of ourselves for a change whilst making some soothing products to pamper our skin.

Elderflower Water Place elderflowers in a stainless steel or enamel saucepan and cover with fresh spring or distilled water. Cover and slowly heat to just below a simmer. Turn the heat as low as it will go and continue heating for about ten minutes tightly covered. Turn off the heat and allow all to sit, covered, overnight. The next morning, strain the infusion off. You will need to strain at least twice through muslin or kitchen towel to remove all the floating debris. Add a quarter of the volume in alcohol as a preservative. Bottle and keep in a cool dark place. Elderflower Toner You could also infuse elderflowers in distilled witchhazel and use the strained liquid to tone your facial skin. Fill a glass jar with elderflowers and cover with distilled witchhazel (available from the chemist). Use a chopstick to stir the mixture to remove any air bubbles, then refill the jar so all the elderflowers are covered. Seal the glass jar with a screwtop lid, label and date. Leave the jar to infuse in a cool, dark place for a couple of weeks.

In using elderflower on our skin, we are following generations of women back into pre-history. Mary Beith, in her book about herbal use in the Highlands and Islands , “Healing Threads”, records elderflowers being used for a facial cream hundreds of years ago. The recipe she cites involved elderflowers being infused in a mixture of almond oil and lard, which her informant recalled smelled horrible. Very few people use fresh pork dripping to make infused oil these days, although it is supposed to be one of the best mediums for conveying herbs through the skin!

Elderflower Salve In this recipe I used a mixture of avocado and olive oil. You could use almond, sunflower, coconut, jojoba or a mixture of sunflower and cocoa butter (this will thicken automatically on cooling so don't add extra beeswax). 4 oz fresh elderflowers 1 small bottle of avocado oil plus enough olive oil to make up to around 8 fl ozs. Place half the elderflowers in the inner pan of a double boiler and cover with the oil. Replace the lid firmly and place inside the other saucepan which is about half filled with water. Heat the external saucepan so that the water gently boils. Do not let the pan boil dry! Boil for about 2 hours, then remove the inner pan and strain off the oil, squeezing the elderflowers to remove as much oil as possible. Place the remainder of the elderflowers inside the inner pan and pour over the oil from the first infusion. Replace the lid firmly and heat for a further two hours. The infused oil will smell strongly of elderflowers. Strain the oil into a heated glass bottle or jar and cap with a screw top lid. If using fresh herb, let the infused oil sit for about three days to make sure any water content separates out. Decant oil. If water drops are left in the infused oil it will go off more quickly. Label the oil with the name and date that you made it.

To turn the oil into a salve, grate 1oz beeswax into 8 fl. ozs. of the infused oil and heat gently until it melts. The easiest way to test the constituency of the salve is to drop a small amount of oil plus melted wax into a cup of cold water. It will cool and thicken immediately. Rub it between your fingers. If it's not thick enough, add more grated wax. Pour into small jars and seal. The salve should thicken on cooling and the colour often becomes lighter. Label and date.

To make a salve for bruises, you could use the same method of making a double infused oil and salve but substitute elder leaves or bark for the elder flowers and use either olive or sunflower oil as the infusion medium.

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