Well, I made lip balm today. Here’s the recipe I used:
5 oz Olive Oil
1.5 oz Lanolin
2 oz Coconut Oil
2 oz Beeswax
.08 oz Stevia
800 IU Vitamin E
=10.5 oz lip balm
I made 6 flavors: chai, apple, mint, pearberry, cotton candy, jasmine tea. I used 1 mL flavor oil per 10 tubes of lip balm.
I don’t think I would buy the pearberry or jasmine tea again; the scents aren’t very strong and the pearberry smells kind of gross/fake to me. On the other hand, the cotton candy smells much better in the lip balm than it did in the bottle, so that was a happy surprise.
I used various shades of lip safe micas and oxides to color the balms. I just did it by eyeballing it. I’m pretty happy with how that turned out, though.
I thought that the recipe would make 50 lip balms (the containers are .15 oz each), but with the little bit of waste that happens I only got 44 1/2 tubes out of it.
Why am I unhappy with the recipe? Well, for one thing, I didn’t add enough flavor oil OR sweetener, so that is disappointing; it’s only slighted scented and not at all sweet. It’s hard to know how much flavor oil to add, since it doesn’t smell the same while it is hot and liquid as it does once it cools and hardens. I will double the sweetener and the flavor oils next time.
Also, it seems like the lip balm is a little too squishy, more like the kind you would use in a pot than a tube. The consistency might change over night, though (I’m not sure how “set” it is, currently), so I will update this when I know for sure. But the recipe MIGHT need just a little more beeswax.
Also, I think I prefer shea butter or mango butter to coconut oil; I just didn’t happen to have either of those on hand. And I like to use a little jojoba oil in my recipes as well. I didn’t have that on hand, either. Overall, though, it has a nice consistency.
Overall, I would rate this recipe a 8.5/10.