More Help for the Lip Balm Addicted

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To all of my fellow lip balm addicts out there...
Here is a link to an incredibly indulgent lip balm recipe from Janice Cox that I recently found on the Herb Companion website. It is crafted with real chocolate! Heavenly!
Janice Cox has been one of my skin care inspirations for several years. She has three wonderful books full of amazing natural body care recipes that I highly recommend. Janice is very creative, informative and a pioneer in bringing natural, DIY skin care to the world.
This would be a great holiday recipe with the addition of peppermint essential oil or a great Valentine's gift!

Handmade Holiday Gifts: Autumn Spice Lip Butter

Photo from flickr by omar_j

Wow! The Holidays are here! It seems like just the other day I was playing in the sand by the beach with my girls.

Have the Holidays crept up on you, too? Are you looking for a fun, affordable handmade gift for the special people in your life?

We made this Autumn Spice Lip Butter at our monthly Mary Jane's Farm Meeting this past Sunday (for more info on what else we did at the meeting and the local Iron Oak Chapter check out the Iron Oak Farm Blog). This lip butter is perfect for anyone you know that has lips. It has a wonderful soft texture and is loaded with fabulously emollient ingredients, such as shea and avocado butter, that help protect your lips from loss of water through the skin tissues into the air (a main cause of chapping in the colder months). It is also free of any of the gnarly ingredients that can be found in some other lip balms, such as petroleum by-products or mineral oil. The addition of orange and clove oils are uplifting, warming and give you that fuzzy Holiday feeling of handmade orange pomanders!

This recipe is an adaptation of the original recipe developed by the amazing Irene Wolansky at Mountain Rose Herbs (click here for her original recipe and other yummy spicy goodies!).

Autumn Orange Spice Lip Butter
2 teaspoons Shea Butter
1 teaspoon Avocado Butter
3 Tablespoons Coconut Oil
1 Tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon Beeswax (or Candellila Wax)
15 Drops Sweet Orange Oil (therapeutic grade)
5 Drops Clove Oil (therapeutic grade)
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Place wax, butters and oils in a small glass Pyrex measuring cup and gently heat in a pot of hot water. Once melted, remove from the stovetop and add essential oils.  Immediately pour the mixture into lip balm containers. Cool completely before placing caps onto the lip balm containers. If giving as gifts, you can decorate them with stickers and use a lip balm package sealer and heat gun to finish. Makes 10 lip balm tubes.

I purchased my butters, oil, wax and lip balm tubes from Essential Wholesale, one of my favorite sources for natural and organic ingredients (great customer service, too!). I used DoTerra Wild Orange Oil and Organic Clove Oil from Essential Aura. The lip balm tube sealers are from Bramble Berry (although, I'm not sure if they still sell these). If you buy the ingredients and packaging in bulk to make several tubes as gifts, you can get the cost down to around 30 cents a tube. And it is worth every cent!!!

Stay tuned for more fun, easy handmade Holiday gift recipes! Have a blessed Thanksgiving!