Sunday, July 25, 2010

Homemade vegan lip balm

A little while back I found a recipe for homemade vegan lip balm, and I finally had the chance to make some. This winter my lips have been really dry, and I've just left it that way because I didn't want to spend truckloads of money on a lip balm from the store. For one thing, for some reason it's incredibly hard to find vegan lip balm (almost everything used beeswax) even most of the lip balms in health food stores had beeswax, and the specifically vegan ones had a price that went through the roof! And I didn't really want to put petroleum by-products, or other weird chemicals with super long hard to pronounce names on my lips. Hum.

The recipe I used is from Healthy Vegan Homemade. It was really easy to do, quite quick (I had time to make a cup of tea while it was all melting) and the end result is fantastic.

I did make some substitutions for some of the ingredients: Hemp oil for the vitamin E oil (hemp oil is strangely, SO much cheaper to buy), avocado oil for the jojoba oil (I just could not find it). I also used peppermint oil instead of spearmint. But use whatever. I think cinnamon oil would be great! I saw it at Mrs. Flannery's which is where I found my peppermint oil (funnily enough, it was the cheapest price there).

Here is my cat (her name is Bob) sitting atop her perch of an upturned esky. Oh, and the lip balm. It sets very quickly, and rolls up and down the tube with ease :) And I get to smell peppermint everyday!

One thing - the recipe specifies to use a glass measuring cup. Pay attention to that...I melted my plastic one. DUH. So I went and bought a glass one ha.

It's bright green mainly because of the avocado oil which is bright green. The hemp oil is pretty green too. This doesn't show up on your lips :)

So, I am very happy with my first attempt at making homemade cosmetics. (This will continue. I'm trying to cut out the need for buying shampoos, face moisturisers, etc from the store.)

Wanna know how much it cost? $1.18 per average sized tube of lip balm. That's it.

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