This pretty coral lip balm brings a pretty pop of colour and a hint of shimmer to an already awesome tube of lip balm. It’s fun to make and easily tweaked to your preferred shade of coral and level of colour and shimmer—I like it a lot.
The colour comes from a blend of two different oil-soluble dyes. The orange is from some buriti oil, but you can use seabuckthorn instead as buriti is rather hard to find. The red dye is Saffire Blue’s carmine dye (not the carmine powder, which is not oil soluble). Both are quite potent and give a great colour punch without adding very much.
A hint of mica adds shimmer. I used a blend of gold and copper for a coral shimmer, but silver or bronze (or just one of either gold or copper) mica would also look fantastic.
I tried a new peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) for this lip balm. I usually stick to New Directions’ Peppermint Supreme, but this time I gave their organic peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada) a try. I find it’s a bit more herbal than the supreme, but still nice. Spearmint would also be a great choice, or you can leave out essential oils all together and appreciate the scent of the cocoa butter (USA / Canada), coconut oil, and beeswax.
Coral Lip Balm
4g | 0.14oz beeswax (USA / Canada)
6g | 0.21oz virgin coconut oil
5g | 0.17oz cocoa butter (USA / Canada)
10g | 0.35oz sweet almond oil (USA / Canada)
4 drops buriti oil or sea buckthorn seed oil
5 drops oil-dispersed carmine dye
5 drops peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada)
1 nip (1/64 tsp) gold mica (I use these measuring spoons for such tiny amounts)
1 nip (1/64 tsp) copper micaCombine the beeswax, coconut oil, cocoa butter (USA / Canada), and sweet almond oil (USA / Canada) in a small heat resistant glass measuring cup. Place that measuring cup in a small saucepan with about 3cm/1″ of barely simmering water in it, and melt in that double boiler (this will take about five to ten minutes).
Once everything has melted, remove from the heat and stir in the dyes, micas, and essential oil with a flexible silicone spatula.
Quickly pour the mixture into lip balm tubes and let it set up before labelling (I use these labels) and using. This recipe will fill five lip balm tubes.
Don’t have some of the oils called for in this recipe? Read this for information on making substitutions!
you make some lovely things, love your blog, can we see the coral lippy on you pls?
This one doesn’t really look like anything other than a touch shiny with the amount of colour the recipe calls for 🙂
It would be very nice to see what it looks like on your lips.
It doesn’t really look like anything other than a touch shiny with the amount of colour the recipe calls for 🙂
Would like to try this lipbalm but what is the measurement of a “nip”? It looks like 1/8 teaspoon. I’ve tried to make colored lipbalm before but the color never shows on the lips.
Hi Frann! I cover this in the FAQ 🙂
If you want something with a strong colour punch, check out my lipsticks 🙂
Thanks, found the measuring spoon set from your link on amazon…. Yay! I’ll check out you lipstick recipes also.
🙂
I absolutely love this colour, and I’m super keen to give it a go. I would like to make a vegan version though. Can you please recommend a substitute for the Carmine dye that will still allow me to create this gorgeous coral colour? (I already have a sub for the beeswax)
Hi Kate! The best you’ll be able to do is a blend of red and yellow oxides, though the red oxide will not match the vibrancy of the carmine (nothing natural does, sadly).
Ohhhhhh, my favorite spring and summer color! Thanks for the post, I’m so making these!
🙂 Enjoy!
The color makes me think “Spring”! I’m getting low on tinted lip balm so this post is timely. Marie, can you help me figure out why I’m no longer getting your email updates? They had been coming in fine until around Christmas and then stopped for some reason. You are in my contacts list, the emails are not appearing in spam, and I’ve tried re subscribing – no success. 🙁
Hi Colleen! You aren’t on my list of active subscribers with the email address you used here. If you’ve re-subscribed, did you get the confirmation email and click the link in it?
That is the email I’ve subscribed with and for some reason I don’t get a confirmation email after re subscribing.
I just tried subscribing again, and no confirmation email 🙁 However, when I check the boxes at the bottom of this message to follow this post, I do get a confirmation email.
Hmmmm. Odd.
Weird! I think I have a workaround, though. I made you an alias email that forwards to this email—try subscribing with colleen_subscribes [at] humblebeeandme.com and see if that works 🙂
It worked, as I got a confirmation that I am subscribed. Thanks Marie! I am totally in love with your blog and your talents and was bummed to keep missing out. Thanks for taking the time to help me 🙂
Wonderful! Glad I was able to help 🙂
I have everything to make this, except the colors/ mica. I wonder could I sub cocoa power for some type of tint?
Please don’t—it’ll be gritty and gross 🙁
Can you tell me where you got your metal measuring spoons?
I bought a set like it at Kitchen & Company, but mine has three measuring spoons: dash, pinch, & smidgen.
http://www.kitchenandcompany.com/kitchen-tools/measuring-tools/measuring-cups-measuring-spoons/_/Norpro-Mini-Measuring-Spoon-Set/?=&q=measuring%2bspoons
Looks like a “nit” is smaller than a “smidgen” and I learned from your link that a “smidgen” is 1/32 t. So a “nit” is 1/64 t. ?? Wow that’s small, how do I measure that? Order the spoons and use half a “smidgen”?
Definitely look for a set of spoons that have the nip as well—super useful!
🙂
I have a link in the FAQ 🙂
Hi sweety! very nice recipe (as always!)….mmm! very nice realy….but i have one question for you! (as you know i hate, the carmine dye and….I CAN NOT even imagine this thing off me!)…so…can we replace it with something else?…with an oxide for example?…..however your recipe is amazing! as always!…Greetings from the very rainy Athens today!
You can use red oxide, but it won’t give the same colour—nothing natural can.
Hello Marie!
I’ve been doing a whole lot of looking on your blog (which has been my absolute favorite source of DIY cosmetics information for a little over a year now, thank you so much for offering such incredibly valuable information!) and I have a question concerning the various methods used to color your balms/lipsticks. When I first started making my own lip balms, I *cheated* and added about a full stick of lipstick to a mix that filled 2 tubes of lip balm. Though it isn’t all “natural”, adding approximately 1/2 stick of lipstick to each tube of lip balm gave an amazing opaque, pinky shade that (not surprisingly) seems to stand somewhere in-between what you’d expect both in intensity and texture from a lipstick and tinted lip balm mix. Now that I’ve gained the knowledge necessary to create this naturally, I’d be really interesting in hearing what you’d recommend! Would using an oil-soluble liquid carmine dye give me an intense opaque color, or can I expect it to be fairly sheen? If I used Australian Reef Red (paired with a light clay and magnesium stearate) with a usual lip balm recipe, would it be so opaque and intense that I’d have to apply it with a brush? Which would be best for something intense, but also very “every day” and wearable?
Thank you in advance 🙂
Hi Molly! Thanks so much for reading and DIYing with me 🙂 When it comes to making tinted lip balms and lipsticks, I think you’ll find iron oxides to be the best thing to have on hand. If you get the primary colours you can make loads of different shades, and the intensity of the colour depends pretty much entirely on the amount of pigment you decide to use. A little bit makes a tint, more makes a lipstick. You can check out some of my lipstick recipes to see how much I use and try halving that for more of a tint 🙂
Thank you so much for your advice! I’ll be sure to try that out next 🙂
🙂
This carmine stuff is so neat!
Mix it with mica and you get such big colour changes! I mixed some white silver and got pink, copper gave me me Body Shops cranberry colour!
I don’t think 30mL will be enough for all the expirmenting I want to do!
Isn’t it?!?! Try it with titanium dioxode and you’ll get the most amazing Barbie pinks! Try it with yellow iron oxide and TD for bright corals. LOOOOOOOVE 😀 Have fun 😉
I did the other day! I have so many tubes of lip colour in my fridge! I have to be very careful with adding yellow to anything as my skin tone and any shade of orange just don’t work very well.
I am madly in love with brick red oxide and a nip of blue! I am playing around with the amounts to come up with a winter colour for day to day wear. Do you find with the oxides, you get colour build up in the creases of your lips?
I find any creasing isn’t usually a result of any specific pigment, it’s a result of the formula—not terribly helpful, I know. I worked really hard on the book formulas to make sure that’s not an issue!