A Homemade Holiday: Lip Balm

Who wants to make some homemade lip balm?  It’s time for our next Homemade Holiday project! 

For today’s project, you will need:

• 6 Tbsp. Coconut Oil
• 2 tsp. Shea Butter
• 2 Tbsp. Bees Wax Pellets
• 15 drops Essential Oils (Optional)
• Lip Balm Tubes or Tubs (I used 18 tubes and 3 tubs)
• Heat-safe, Glass Measuring Cup (Pyrex)
• Pot
• Silicon Spatula
• Wax Paper (or some other disposable covering for your counter top)

This project is very simple, though slightly messy.  I think it took under 20 minutes for us to make 18 tubes of lip balm and 3 tubs of lip balm.  (Please ignore the honey in the picture below.  We ended up not using it!)

You’ll start by filling your pot with water and heating it up on the stove-top.  The recommended temp is medium-low, but our gas stove is very sensitive and difficult to “set” to a certain temp. range.  Honestly, it’s not a huge deal, so long as it doesn’t get so hot that you burn your oils (which is hard to do).  Measure out all of your ingredients, except for the essential oils, and put them into your measuring cup.  Place the measuring cup into the pot.

It takes awhile for the ingredients to melt.  Just stir occasionally and keep an eye on everything.  The beeswax will be the last thing to finish melting, but when it does, it does it fast!  While it is warming, remove the caps from your tubs or tubs and place them on top of a sheet of waxed paper or some other disposable item (a sheet of regular paper should work okay).  

Mix in your e.o.’s quickly, and pour into the tub or tubes immediately and slowly, filling to the top, but being careful not to overfill.  (Overfilling isn’t a huge deal, but it means more clean-up for you, and “wasted” product, which could be reused if you can get it off of the waxed paper and re-melt it.)

This can easily be turned into a lip gloss by adding a colorant.  I’ve read about people using Kool-Aid, or you can get different colors of zinc-oxide online or in some craft stores like Hobby Lobby.  If you plan to do that, you’d want to add your colorant after everything has melted.  

We don’t use a lot of paper towel in our house, but I like to keep some around for craft projects like this because it makes clean up so much easier.  If you wipe down your measuring cup immediately after melting everything, clean-up is easy.  You can also let it harden, and you should be able to scrape it off fairly easily.  I used one of my regular glass measuring cups, but I have a few pots, pans, and utensils just for making things like deodorant, lip balm, sunscreen, and soap.  I’ve used mason jars for making lip balm in the past, but pouring out of them is difficult, and if you try using an eye dropper to fill the tubes, it dries quickly as well and makes a bigger mess.  I might try finding an extra Pryex glass measuring cup at a thrift store to keep on hand for this type of thing so I don’t have to worry so much about how clean I get it after my project is complete, particularly if I would have used colorant of some sort. 

You could print off labels using return address labels, or hand write on the labels.  You could also use a fun paper to decorate the tubes.  I still haven’t decided what we’ll do with ours.  

I ended up dividing my oils and making a batch of peppermint lip balm and one of lemon.  Feel free to use the scents that you like, just be cautious that you are using oils that are safe for use on skin.  Will you be making lip balm?  What flavor (if any) will you give it)?

Love~Danielle