I usually use castor oil in my lip balms because I love the feel of it, so you can imagine my disappointment when I discovered there was none in the house. I decided to look at the ingredients I had to hand and come up with an entirely new recipe -- and the result is the nicest lip balm I've ever made.
Some of the ingredients are a bit exotic (I get samples of lovely oils and butters frequently), so I'll give easy-to-find alternatives that will work just as well. The main ingredient in this lip balm is olive oil which neither expensive nor hard to find.
Gracefruit's Best-Ever Lip Balm
30% Olive Oil (use a good virgin olive oil here, not pomace)
22% Beeswax
15% Cocoa Butter
10% Mango Butter (you can use shea butter or avocado butter)
10% Macadamia Butter (or olive, sunflower or almond butter)
9% Avocado Oil (any oil will work -- sweet almond, apricot kernel, etc)
2% Vitamin E*
1% Squalane*
1% flavour oil or essential oil (peppermint essential oil is lovely)
In a pyrex or microwave-safe container, melt the beeswax with the olive oil. I do this is 2 minute intervals to avoid anything boiling over or burning. Once the beeswax has melted, add the butters and stir until they've melted, too. They may melt rather slowly, but it's important to add the butters this way so that your lip balm doesn't become grainy later.
Once the butters have melted, add the rest of the ingredients and stir well. Once everything is incorporated, your balm is ready to go into the containers. I've designed this balm to be firm enough for lip balm tubes. I wouldn't recommend tins or pots as the balm will be fairly hard.
I added a speck of colour to these, but it isn't necessary. They are just as lovely without.
I hope you enjoy this recipe. I've made a lot of lip balms in my time, and this is by far the best.
*if you don't have these, just increase the amount of your oils a little to keep the oil/wax/butter ratio correct.
11 comments:
Seems a lovely recipe!
Thanks for sharing! I just submitted an order yesterday and can't wait to have your new flavour oils ^^
What an incredible sounding recipe; I love the sound of all of the oil combos and can't wait to try it.
I hope you like it! Castor-free lip balm is new to me, and I'm surprised how nice it is.
I love your other lipbalm recipes. They have never failed on me - will have a go at trying this one asap
Thank you a thousand times for sharing this right now! I have been getting a lot of requests for lip balms but hadn't started playing around with formulas yet. Yours will be a perfect starting point and could not have come at a better time. Thank you, thank you! :)
This is so cool...we had just run out of lipbalms and dh was grousing, and now maybe I can try making some!
Where do you get your squalane? And is it olive oil based or shark-based?
Thanks, E!!
MP, Amber, I hope you like it. We're all very happy with it here.
Teresa, it's olive based. I think shark oil one is called squalene. I buy mine in bulk here in the UK, but I think Columbus Foods has it in the US.
Thank you!
Using your formula as a guide (with a few ratio tweaks so I could put mine in pots), I came up with a recipe based on the ingredients I had and I LOVED it! Thank you so much for sharing!!!
Hi I am really interested in trying your lip balm recipe, could you list the ingredients by weight and volume.....big help for someone new who is still measuring everyone and weighing the ingredients.
Sounds like an amazing recipe and lovely combinaton of all those ingredients!
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