Easy recipe and instructions for making about five small pots of vanilla and cocoa butter lip balm. It’s a conditioning and deliciously flavored lip balm that you can make in less than thirty minutes. All you need to do is melt the ingredients together and then pour it into containers. Simple!
This is probably one of the best lip balm recipes I’ve created. Incredibly simple to make, it tastes of vanilla and chocolately cocoa butter and leaves your lips feeling soft and shiny. The project only needs about a half-hour of your time and a few gorgeous, natural ingredients, including cocoa butter, sweet almond oil, and beeswax. The recipe will make enough lip balm for yourself and a few friends. However, feel free to scale the recipe up to make much larger batches.
Cocoa butter is a great oil for lip balm since it tastes great, adds excellent skin conditioning properties, and helps solidify the lip balm. Without hard oils like cocoa butter or waxes like beeswax, your lip balm won’t firm up, and it will have trouble sticking to your lips. Beeswax is incredible at helping lip balms to stay on, but if you’d like to make a Vegan version of this recipe, you can replace it with candelilla wax.
Lip Balm is Easy to Make
One of the easiest and most practical skincare products you can make is lip balm. You don’t need to handle any hazardous ingredients, you can use pots and utensils from the kitchen, and it’s safe enough to make with children. Lip balms are a combination of liquid and solid oils that, when melted together, will create a product that is softer than the hard oils used and harder than the liquid oils. The ratio of these is what you play with to get the right consistency. When you get those right, you can add aroma, color, and antioxidants (like vitamin E) to make the product taste and look nicer. Here are a few more balm recipes for you to try making:
- Lemon Balm Lip Balm Recipe (for Cold Sores)
- Herb-Infused Lip Balm Recipe
- Cocoa and Mint Cracked Heel Balm Recipe
Cocoa Butter Lip Balm Recipe
makes approx ten lip balm tubes (4.5ml) or five pots (10ml). The recipe below is measured by weight, and I recommend using a digital kitchen scale. Otherwise, you can probably eyeball this recipe by using one part beeswax, two parts cocoa butter, and three parts sweet almond oil*.
- 7g (0.25oz)Beeswax
- 15g (0.53oz)Cocoa Butter
- 30g (1.06oz)Sweet Almond oil*
- Ten drops Vanilla Flavor oil(optional)**
- Eight drops of Vitamin E oil (optional)
- Lip Balm tubes (recipe makes 10)
- Or Aluminum lip balm pots (recipe makes 3-4)
- * If you are allergic to almonds, use another light liquid oil like grapeseed or sunflower oil. Also, I infused my sweet almond oil with chamomile, which is entirely optional for this recipe. Chamomile has natural anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties, making it great for damaged skin (think sunburn, chapped lips, or recovering from cold sores). In this recipe, I made a homemade infused oil with 120g of sweet almond oil with two teaspoons of dried chamomile flowers.
- ** Do not use vanilla flavoring meant for cooking. It’s water-based and will separate in your recipe. Oil and water don’t mix!
Step 1: Melt the Oils
Place the beeswax, cocoa butter, and sweet almond oilinto a small pan – if you have one with a sauce-pouring spout, then even better. Melt the oils completely using the double-boiler method: float the pan with oils inside a pan filled with boiling water. This ensures that the oils melt evenly but don’t get too hot.
Step 2: Pouring & Cooling
Add the optional flavor oil and vitamin E and stir well. When I make lip balms, I use a bamboo skewer to stir with since it doesn’t pick up too much oil. Put a cold spoon in the oil, and a lot of the lip balm will ‘stick’ to it when you take the spoon out.
When mixed thoroughly, pour the oil into the lip balm containers, which should be sterile when they arrive from the supplier. Cocoa butter has a tendency to go a bit grainy if it’s not cooled quickly. I’d advise popping your lip balms in the freezer, without the lids on, for around thirty minutes after pouring them. Take them out after this time to let them come up to room temperature.
If you cool these lip balms at room temperature, they’ll be perfectly fine to use, though. There’s just a chance that the lip balm will feel a little gritty when you first rub it on. Within literally a couple of seconds, it will melt and feel smooth. If cooling at room temperature, leave them on the counter with the lids off. They’ll cool and harden within an hour or two.
Step 4: Seal the Containers
You can put the lids on when the lip balms are at room temperature. If you put them on before then, you could get condensation under the lids, and you don’t want that. Moisture can affect shelf-life and cause the lip balms to go rancid.
Step 5: Label the Lip Balms
Label the tubes by wrapping paper around them and gluing/taping. A handwritten label makes it even more personal. The lip balms should be used by the nearest expiry date of the ingredients you use. Generally, 1-2 years.
