Shea butter is a versatile ingredient that you can use in a wide variety of homemade beauty products. It’s great for lotion bars, body butter and many other recipes that need to be extra moisturizing. Shea butter also makes a great ingredient in homemade lip balm recipes. Below, learn more about the benefits of using Shea butter in your skincare recipes and discover how to make your own lip balm with Shea butter.
Benefits of Shea Butter for Lip Balm
Shea butter is great for lip balm because of its moisturizing and anti-inflammatory properties. It’s great for helping to prevent chapped lips, especially in the dry winter months. Shea butter is easily absorbed into the skin, making it a perfect lip balm ingredient. It also blends well with other ingredients used for lip balm such as beeswax, coconut oil, mango butter and cocoa butter.
How to Make Lip Balm with Shea Butter
Making homemade lip balm couldn’t be easier! You only need a few supplies and ingredients. The ingredients for making lip balm are melted together, then poured into lip balm tubes or tins.
The butters and oils in lip balm recipes usually have different melting points. This means they may also cool at different rates. As a result, you may end up with a slightly gritty texture in your lip balm recipe. Fortunately, this is easy to prevent!
The easiest way to prevent gritty homemade lip balm is to force your lip balm tubes to cool more quickly. This can be done by placing your lip balm in the fridge or freezer as soon as you fill them with your melted lip balm mixture. When the lip balm mixture is put in a cold location, the ingredients cool at the same rate, which prevents that grainy texture from forming.
Supplies & Ingredients for Making Lip BalmÂ
Did you know natural homemade lip balm can be made with only three ingredients? To make a basic batch of lip balm, you only need Shea butter, coconut oil and beeswax.
To make 10 standard tubes of lip balm, you will need the following supplies:
- 20 grams Shea Butter
- 20 grams Coconut Oil
- 10 grams White Beeswax Pellets
- 10 empty lip balm tubes (standard size)
- Optional: 10 shrink wrap bands (30x70 mm size)
- 3 ml Plastic Pipette
- Digital Scale
- Mini Whisk
- 10 lip balm tubes (round or oval shape)
- Glass measuring cup for mixing
- Small sauce pan
- Potholder
Check out our Tinted Lip Balm Recipe for a video tutorial of making lip balm! You can also watch the video on our YouTube channel.
Steps for Making Shea Butter Lip Balm
- Place your glass measuring cup on the scale and tare it to zero.
- Weigh the following ingredients into the measuring cup:
- 20 grams of Shea Butter
- 20 grams of Coconut Oil
- 10 grams of Beeswax Pellets
- Fill a small sauce pan about ¼ of the way full with water. Place the glass measuring cup into the water bath. You now have a double boiler that you can use to melt the ingredients.
- Place the pan on the stove and heat it on high until the water boils.
- Turn the heat down to medium and stir the ingredients with the whisk.
- When the mixture has melted, remove the pan from the heat.
- Place the pan on a potholder. To keep the mixture warm, you may leave the measuring cup in the hot water while you work.
- Arrange your lip balm tubes on the table or counter so that you can fill them easily.
- Use the plastic pipette to transfer lip balm mixture into each tube. Be sure to fill the tubes completely full.
- Carefully move the tubes to the fridge or freezer, being sure to keep the tubes upright on a flat surface where they won’t tip over.
- Once the mixture is completely cool, put the caps on and label your lip balm accordingly. Don’t forget shrink wrap bands to create a professional touch!
This basic lip balm recipe is easy to customize. If you want, you can also add ingredients such as flavor oils to make flavored lip balm, or vitamin E oil to create an extra moisturizing recipe. Read our blog on using lip balm flavor oils for more information. If you want to make tinted lip balm, follow our easy tutorial for making lip balm with mica powder.
Shea butter lip balm also makes the perfect gift for men or women. Use this recipe to make stocking stuffers, favors or DIY gift baskets!