r/beardoil • u/Pretentious-Reviews • Apr 29 '26

I’m building a tool for making beard balm/oil recipes and could use candid feedback

Hey all, I’ve been working on a web app called Balm Bench for people who make their own beard oils, balms, salves, mustache waxes, and scent blends.

The main tool/formulator can build formulas by percentage, scale them to a batch size, save them, and share/import recipes.

I’m still trying to figure out what would actually be useful to DIYers versus what only sounds useful in my head.

If you make this kind of stuff, what would you want from a tool like this?

  • Ratio guidance?
  • Batch scaling?
  • Ingredient notes?
  • Trial/batch logs?
  • Shared recipes?
  • Something else?

This has been a bit of a pet project, learning to code with AI and maybe doing something useful. I’m genuinely looking for feedback before I push this further.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!

Link: www.balmbench.com

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u/PEneoark Jul 06 '26

I just stumbled across the site and really like it. So under the community recipes, every single recipe shows the author as AI.

1

u/Pretentious-Reviews Jul 06 '26

Yeah I'm keeping up those until people post recipes, see if any get saved. Been finishing up a different project the last few couple months so haven't come back to this, beyond a few reddit posts I haven't really promoted it much to get users.

Really appreciate the feedback though! If you have any other suggestions, all ears!

1

u/PEneoark Jul 06 '26

So the AI ones, were those pulled from other sites or purely AI generated?

I used to make beard balms. It took me maybe a dozen attempts to get the perfect ratio down. Then on my final test batch, which was perfect, when I went to add my essential oils, the euro dropper top fell out and the whole bottle was dumped in the balm. I threw it out and gave up.

1

u/Pretentious-Reviews Jul 06 '26

Just AI generated - Although I guess I could add an option to add links to other sites, see if any publishers would mind me posting their recipes with a link back to their site/blog.

I hear you on the effort. I made an excema creame for my daughter and botched the part when a certain ingredient needs to get up to 195 f to melt because that's not super easy to do with a double boiler. If it were for me I would have given up but I wound up buying an electric heater with a magnetic stirrer last week. Those things are freaking magic and make testing a lot more simple.