I am one of those people who NEED lip balm. My lips are continously chapped, which my husband says is because I use lip balm - it throws my lip's natural moisture out of balance. I don't care what he says because having dry flaky lips is really uncomfortable and that is how I spend most of the winter even with the lip balm. I just have extremely dry skin and we heat with a wood stove. Blah. So I always have at least one lip balm in the house and one in my purse. The one in the house got eaten by a dog several weeks ago and so I was left with the one in my purse. It has been wearing down for a while now and it was time to buy a new one. However, since we are trying to be frugal, I just didn't want to spend the $3 on an organic lip balm. I have been wanting to make my own and just never took the time to do it so I decided that now was the time.
I decided to keep it super simple with only three ingredients. Coconut oil for all of its good properties and natural beeswax to firm it up a bit. The peppermint oil just for fun. I had everything on hand so I didn't have to spend any money. There are a gazillion recipes for making your own lip balm, but since I only wanted to do it on a teeny tiny scale, I just threw mine together without following a recipe. I figured I wasn't going to kill myself with lip balm gone bad.
I filled half of a 1/3 cup measuring cup with coconut oil, then loosely filled the rest of the cup with beeswax, which I flaked off the big bar with a knife. We had the beeswax bars left over from when we were making candles to sell at the farmer's markets.
I then put that in a metal can in a pot full of boiling water, double boiler style. I used the metal can because beeswax does not come off of things and I just recycled it when I was done. It only took a minute or two for the oil and wax to melt together. I then added a drop of peppermint oil. We have actual plastic lip balm stick containers, but pouring hot liquid into plastic is not my thing. We also had these small aluminum tea light containers and I thought they were the perfect size. The amount I made filled three of these.
Cooling down.
They were almost completely cool within 15 minutes. The red tint in the one container must have been from the metal can - it had held pureed tomatoes. Oh well, lycopene for my lips!
The combination that I used turned out just right. The only problem is that I don't have lids for them, so for now they are on the kitchen counter covered with a bowl. I'll figure something out. But at least my lips feel better and I didn't have to spend any money. Plus, it was good for the environment because I didn't buy another plastic tube. Think of all of the lip balm containers that get thrown away - they just sit there forever. All in the name of kissable lips.
I shared this post on Living Well, Spending Less for Thrifty Thursday.
