I made lip balm today
In my neverending, lifelong fight against extremely chapped lips* I did some reading which indicated that coconut oil was the miracle ingredient I needed in a lip balm. Unfortunately, coconut oil is totally rock-solid at winter room temperature, so it's hard to apply, and when you do apply it, it melts to total liquid at body temperature and all traces are gone within minutes. So straight coconut oil is out. I found a recipe online for home made lip balm (I've tried ALL the commercial brands and they don't do squat--except for Carmex, which I'm actually allergic to and makes my face swell up) which called for:
20% beeswax
25% coconut oil
15% cocoa butter
40% olive oil
melted together in a double boiler (in my case a Pyrex measuring cup I dedicated forever to this purpose, sitting in a small pot of boiling water) and then transferred to empty chapstick tubes (remarkably cheap) or little tubs (also very cheap) via a plastic pipette (which I have a bunch of for painting related purposes). I admit I used a spoon to fill the tubs.
Anyway, once everything finally melted together (which took a lot of patience) it was easy to transfer it into the empty tubes and tubs and it hardened within 5-10 minutes or so to the point where I could put the lids on. I've been using one of the chapstick tubes this evening but it really hasn't been long enough to say whether this is better than the storebought stuff or not. It's definitely cheaper. All the ingredients were cheap as hell online, and I have lots left over.
The hardest part was getting the coconut "oil" (wax) and the cocoa "butter" (brittle solid) into the little dish I had on the kitchen scale. I had to basically shave it off with a spoon until I had enough shavings to meet the necessary weight. It was kind of a pain in the butt. The beeswax is supposed to be the hardest part, but I got pellets of it, and it melted fairly quickly. For me the hardest to melt was the cocoa butter, which seemed to come together as shavings to form large lumps in the measuring cup that didn't melt until quite a long time had passed.
Anyway, I got 10 tubes of lip balm and 4 little tubs of it. And I have a plastic cup with probably enough to refill all of that twice over... I ran out of things to put it into, so I poured the rest into the plastic cup.
I must say it smells nice. A cross between chocolate and coconut... and it isn't greasy even though it has so much oil. It feels nice on the lips, unlike the Vaseline I've been using recently as a last resort.
*the doctors I've talked to agree in thinking that the dogbite that tore away part of my upper lip when I was 2 1/2 years old has disrupted the natural oils/whatevers mechanism that keeps the lips moisturized. My lips get so chapped so quickly that they split deeply and bleed literally for hours, where I have to blot them with a tissue every minute or so. It's awful.
20% beeswax
25% coconut oil
15% cocoa butter
40% olive oil
melted together in a double boiler (in my case a Pyrex measuring cup I dedicated forever to this purpose, sitting in a small pot of boiling water) and then transferred to empty chapstick tubes (remarkably cheap) or little tubs (also very cheap) via a plastic pipette (which I have a bunch of for painting related purposes). I admit I used a spoon to fill the tubs.
Anyway, once everything finally melted together (which took a lot of patience) it was easy to transfer it into the empty tubes and tubs and it hardened within 5-10 minutes or so to the point where I could put the lids on. I've been using one of the chapstick tubes this evening but it really hasn't been long enough to say whether this is better than the storebought stuff or not. It's definitely cheaper. All the ingredients were cheap as hell online, and I have lots left over.
The hardest part was getting the coconut "oil" (wax) and the cocoa "butter" (brittle solid) into the little dish I had on the kitchen scale. I had to basically shave it off with a spoon until I had enough shavings to meet the necessary weight. It was kind of a pain in the butt. The beeswax is supposed to be the hardest part, but I got pellets of it, and it melted fairly quickly. For me the hardest to melt was the cocoa butter, which seemed to come together as shavings to form large lumps in the measuring cup that didn't melt until quite a long time had passed.
Anyway, I got 10 tubes of lip balm and 4 little tubs of it. And I have a plastic cup with probably enough to refill all of that twice over... I ran out of things to put it into, so I poured the rest into the plastic cup.
I must say it smells nice. A cross between chocolate and coconut... and it isn't greasy even though it has so much oil. It feels nice on the lips, unlike the Vaseline I've been using recently as a last resort.
*the doctors I've talked to agree in thinking that the dogbite that tore away part of my upper lip when I was 2 1/2 years old has disrupted the natural oils/whatevers mechanism that keeps the lips moisturized. My lips get so chapped so quickly that they split deeply and bleed literally for hours, where I have to blot them with a tissue every minute or so. It's awful.