I’ve been making homemade soap for almost four years now, but haven’t ventured into the other personal products that can be made at home. Anya’s lips have been getting chapped this winter, and she picks at them … so they get rather ripped up. I had a tube of lip balm that I let her use. She’s four years old, and misused lip balm in all the ways one could imagine to misuse lip balm; and I took it from her. She proceeded to crawl up on the counter when I wasn’t looking and take it back. So when I found her writing on the cabinetry with the lip balm, I took it and hid it from her. Unfortunately, the next time we needed to use it … I have no idea where I hid it. We spent about half an hour looking, and still no lip balm. Good hiding spot, but her lips were getting really raw. So I decided to research lip balm recipes.

Now we have lip balm that doesn’t contain any funky ingredients. I’ve got quite a few oils for making soap, so the project didn’t require a lot of new ‘stuff’ either. Bonus!

Lip Balm Recipe:

25 grams of yellow beeswax
20 grams of shea butter
20 grams of cocoa butter
40 grams of coconut oil

All of these were put into a metal bowl. I put a couple of inches of water in a small saucepan and set the metal bowl into the saucepan. Turned the burner to ‘4’ and heated it for a LONG time until all of the wax melted. Next time, I’ll grate the wax 🙂 The big chunks took a while to melt down. The grated slivers melted before the cocoa butter.

Once everything has melted, add any essential oils you may want (I used about half a teaspoon of peppermint oil, but the peppermint is really subtle). Then pour into containers — if you are using tubes, make sure they are twisted all the way down first! Let them sit for twenty minutes or so to cool. Voila, lip balm!