With ingredients like butter and cocoa, tempered over low heat, and then glamorized with some color, or scent if you’d like… making tinted lip balms is about as easy as making chocolate truffles.
My good friend Melissa K. Norris talked me into putting together a DIY Tinted Lip Balm Kit. I hesitated because while I make my 3 favorite colors that we sell in the store, I knew I’d be inundated with questions like,
How can I make pink?
What about other colorants other than iron oxide?
Give me more options – I want to make a lip balm that’s exactly like my bright red Ruby Woo lipstick!
Seriously, those were my primary reasons. It kind of stressed me out because I could’t find the time to play with color pigments and come up with new shades.
Melissa assured me that she’d take care of the color part. As in, she’d play with the colorants, make her own combination of shades that she likes, and create more options than my current Crimson Rose, French Plum, and Copper Glow. In a nutshell, she’d teach us how to combine various colorants to create the perfect shade.
I sent her the iron oxide pigment colors that I had, and she bought her own favorites from Brambleberry. Then she got to work in her kitchen.
She’s a Make-up Maven, that Melissa. She worked the colorants to get beautiful combos that even her husband would notice and admire.
She sent me this:
Melissa had some awesome pointers to share that she learned along the way:
Cocoa butter pairs nicely with orange essential oil.
Keep a spoon in the freezer when you’re mixing up the colors with the lip balm mixture. Dropping a bit of colored lip balm onto a frozen spoon makes the lip balm harden quickly to make it easy to test on the lips.
Start small and add more color as you mix and test. It’s easier to add more to create a deeper shade than remove (or add more lip balm mixture) to lighten it.
I won’t reveal all of her secrets, because these are part of a video series that she’s including in the launch of her new (physical!) book, HandMade: the Modern Guide to Made-from-Scratch Living. This isn’t an e-book, by the way. This is an actual book that you can mark up, highlight, and pass down to your offspring. You can find it on Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other booksellers.
In her book HandMade, Melissa shows you how to make your own soaps, candles, body care products with herbs and essential oils, lip balms, and lipsticks at home.
As part of the book purchase, you’re also enrolled in her HandMade Masterclass where you’ll learn how to make soap (both cold process and melt and pour), how to make tinted lip balm (with a color guide!), peppermint chocolate whipped body butter, and beeswax candles. But you can only get all these bonuses if you purchase through her HandMade Masterclass page.
Start making your own handmade products today with over $187 worth of items in the physical paperback copy of HandMade: the Modern Guide to Made-from-Scratch Living, 5 Masterclass Videos and tutorials, e-booklets, charts, guides, and bonuses for only $57.
