Updated Lip Balm

If I had to pick the bath and body gift everyone seems to love most, it's definitely my lip balm! However, as I mentioned in my post on last year's recipe, I really wanted something a little heavier and more nurturing, since I tend toward painfully chapped lips in the winter.

So, armed with a year's worth of research and experience making this sort of thing, I decided to create my own recipe.

The new recipe has a few more ingredients:

3 tsp cocoa butter
1 tsp shea butter
1 tbsp beeswax
2 tsp sweet almond oil
3 ml essential oil (optional)
1/4 tsp stevia sweetener (optional)

I melted the first four ingredients in an improvised double boiler, then removed it from the heat and added the essential oils and stevia. The essential oil blends I used were:

• Citrus Spritzer: 2 ml orange and 1 ml lemongrass
• Minty Fresh: 2 ml peppermint (2nd distillation), 1 ml spearmint
• The Cranberry Fig was made using a fragrance oil.

I purchased very fine stevia powder sold for the purpose of lip balm, so I don't know it would work to use the grocery store kind.Used in this small amount, the stevia didn't actually make the lip balm sweet, but just counter acted the slight bitterness of using the essential oils by themselves.

I'm very happy with this recipe, and I can't really think of how I'd improve it. I may experiment with using a tiny amount of honey instead of stevia, so I'll let you know how that goes after I order some more tubes.