Healing Lip Balm Recipe - Try This at Home

Lip balms are a must in our household. We have tried them all and a well known store bought brand used to be my favorite, you know...the one with the red and yellow packaging. Until I discovered that I had to use it continuously to keep moist, soft and un-chapped lips.

Skip the chatter and go to the recipe!

As you all know by now, I love making all natural products for my family and chap stick was no exception. It was only natural (get it?), that I try my hand at making natural lip balms. So I started my journey where most diy'ers do, Pinterest. Yep, that's right. A ton of my research is done between Pinterest and Youtube, books too but I love to find a simple and basic recipe and tweak it to my own preferences and make it my own and both platforms are a great place to start if you're new to this.

While swiping late at night I ran across a simple recipe that involved honey and cinnamon. I loved the idea of honey but wasn't sure how the grainy cinnamon would feel sliding across my lips. I do use cinnamon in my cold process soaps and while it adds a lovely reddish-brown hue, I know it wouldn't bode over well with my family, they tend to be a bit picky. That's perfectly fine with me, at least I know what they do and don't like and it helps me narrow ingredients down.

I quickly captured a screen shot of the recipe on my phone and the next day took inventory of what I already had on hand. I had most of the ingredients from making soaps, body butters and salves already on hand, all I needed were the containers and flavoring to bring my creation to life (inserts Dr. Frankenstein laugh here), okay so this wasn't the hardest recipe I have ever attempted but I like to think of all my creations as my little monsters.

Homemade Lip Balm Making Process

That morning I patiently waited until 9am to make a quick run to our local crafting supply chain store. They had everything I needed for a small test batch. I snatched the lip balm tubes, filling tray and spatula thingy. They had a base but remember I make all natural products so I skipped the premade tub of base and headed to the next store for flavoring. The recipe I was inspired to make used honey and cinnamon but I wanted to have more options so I visited the baker's aisle and quickly found the tiny bottles of flavoring, made by LorAnn Oils. The night before I did some searching for what seemed to be an eternity and I found that she had pretty decent reviews and decided to chance it with her stuff. You can find some of her oils here. She has a decent variety of flavors and they tend to blend well with my natural oils.

Now, at home, I gathered all my supplies and headed to the kitchen, the room I spend most of my time in. I decided for the first batch I would use the microwave method to melt my oils and see how it goes, after all, it was a small batch of 12 I was making and didn't want to bring out the double boiler for such a small amount. Like always, I gathered my materials and arranged them so that when I had the oils melted and ready to pour I wouldn't waste any time arranging the lip balm tubes. I have learned that wax and oils set up pretty quick and I didn't want clumpy lip balms.

The filling tray I got, like this one, was a little tough to maneuver. The tubes kept slipping out each time I inserted the next and I had to do a little magic trick to get them to all stay under the tray, kind of like pulling the table cloth from under the dishes. After a few minutes of fumbling around, I finally got it. From that point I poured my ingredients into my 8 oz. glass Pyrex measuring cup and heated up everything in 30 second increments, so as not to burn anything. It took about2-3 minutes to get everything nice and melted. I saved the flavoring for last as I didn't want to lose the potency of the flavor in the microwave. Not sure if that would even happen but hey, I figured what the heck and it couldn't hurt.

Recipe for homemade flavored lip balm

Beeswax (yellow or white) - 20 mL or approx. 4 tsp

Shea butter (white or yellow) - 15 mL or approx. 3 tsp

Coconut oil virgin - 10 mL or approx. 2 tsp

Sweet Almond Oil - 10 mL or approx. 2 tsp

Flavor oil - 11.1 mL or 3 bottles of 0.125 fl. oz.