VAN ETTEN, N.Y.—Maple is an enticing ingredient in so many products, and its usefulness can apply to more than just foods. 

Honey is already utilized by producers and cosmetics manufacturers alike in numerous skin care and bath products ranging from hand-crafted cold process soaps to high-end face masks. 

Maple is similarly well-suited to many of these products, and even has an advantage over honey: the relative ease of being made into a granulated sugar, which opens up a world of products that are easy to make and market.

What benefits does maple lend to skin care products? 

Skin-loving components include: trace minerals, amino acids, phenolic compounds, vitamins, antioxidants, and of course, sugar which can act as a humectant (moisturizing) and an exfoliant. 

Additionally, maple contains certain organic acids that have been studied for their positive impact on skin (Alpha- and polyhydroxy acids or AHAs and PHAs).

The Notebook

While there are many resources and recipes for DIY skin care products online, much of the information available has not been thoroughly vetted, which can result in inconsistent quality, wasted ingredients, and frustration. 

To provide a reliable reference, the Cornell Maple Program has been testing, improving, and developing recipes for the upcoming Maple Skin Care and Bath Products Notebook. 

This Notebook will cover products like: bar soap, face masks, hand wash, bath bombs, sugar scrubs, and lip balm. 

These items will help to diversify product offerings in your farm store or farmers market booth, drawing people to your business. 

Additionally, they make unique gifts and are well-suited to maple holiday gift baskets. 

Some of these products may even be a good avenue for utilizing off-flavored syrup.

If you would like to experiment with any of the countless recipes from other sources, this Notebook will give you enough information to adapt those recipes to your needs and to troubleshoot any inconsistencies or failures in performance. 

There are few maple-specific skin care recipes in books or online blogs, so search for recipes that call for honey or “honey powder”. 

Where honey is used, you can safely substitute maple syrup on a one-to-one basis, despite honey having slightly higher sugar content. 

Maple sugar can be used to replace “honey powder” and/or cane sugar in many recipes. To achieve the ideal texture, it is important to sieve your maple sugar and store it by granule size. 

Cane sugar granule size is typically about 500 microns. 

We recommend using stackable soil sieve sets with standard screen sizes which can be obtained from scientific equipment dealers. 

Additionally, it is important to be cognizant of the color differences that substituting maple will cause in the final product.

The Lip Balm

A simple and satisfying introduction to making skin care products is lip balm. 

The Cornell Maple Program recently completed development of a lip balm recipe that uses maple syrup as the second ingredient. 

The recipe is publicly available at www.cornellmaple.com. 

Beeswax is a key component of this and most lip balms. From a marketing perspective, opting for a locally produced beeswax to combine with your maple syrup will enhance the local, farm-to-vanity appeal of the final product.

The Cornell Maple Lip Balm was very well received by students at an on-campus event at Cornell University. 

Of 36 participants, a whopping 94.4% liked the product. The only two respondents who did not like the product were infrequent lip balm users. The bar chart below shows the results of this market testing.

Find it in the Maple Lip Balm fact sheet on the New Product Development page. 

This fact sheet is an excerpt from the upcoming Maple Skin Care and Bath Products Notebook which will also be made available for free download on our website.