I’ve been gifting homemade lip balm to friends and family for so long now that people have told me they just hold out for Christmas rather than buy more—and I’m definitely not going to let them down! This year’s holiday lip balm is Sugar Plum themed (it seemed much more lip-compatible than Christmas Tree!). It is softly purple, deliciously fragrant, and it has got staying power that’s suited to colder winter temperatures. I think you’ll like it!
When it comes to makeup I actually wear on a regular basis I find I tend towards subtle, easy-to-apply stuff (read: stuff that goes on easily and lightly enough that it disguises my amateurish makeup application skills). These lip tints were born of my initial experiments with TKB Trading’s new lipstick mold, and I was swept off my feet from the first application. A bright, punchy tube of pigment that blends in with my natural lip colour to create a fantastic, wearable, and easily applied hit of colour? Colour me sold.
This rich, creamy lip balm came out of the experiments I did as I was developing my recipe for my Basic Moldable Lipstick Base. It was the far end of my “let’s make this creamier” experiments, and while I loved how it felt, it basically glued itself to the inside of the lipstick mold and refused to budge. Not one to let something that luxxy go to waste, though, I decided it should be a lip balm instead!
When I got my awesome little TKB Trading Lipstick Mold one of the first things I wanted to investigate was the compatibility of the lipstick recipes in my book with the mold. The compatibility was resoundingly… not. Efforts to use the lipstick bases from my book resulted in lipsticks that looked like they’d been torn in half. They wouldn’t come out of the mold in one piece (or even three) to save they lives—I had to dig them out with the handle of a spoon and many, many cotton buds. Boo. Oh well, at least we know. Anyhow, with my learnings from working with TKB’s lovely moldable lipstick base I set off to create my own. As you can probably guess I’ve got a lot of cosmetic type ingredients so I’m thinking I’ll create at least two different bases; this one will be a more basic one, featuring easier-to-purchase ingredients.
Back in December I picked up Laniege’s Lip Sleeping Mask at San Francisco’s Duty Free shop during a rather long stop-over on my way to New Zealand. I’d read about the product working wonders for super dry lips and was intrigued by those claims and also by the idea of having something novel to entertain me, however briefly, on my upcoming 13-hour flight across the Pacific.
One of the first recipes I ever shared on Humblebee & Me was for a “Super Nourishing Hair Balm“, all the way back in October of 2011. I’d actually made the balm months earlier, before I’d launched the blog, and had been testing it all summer and fall before I suddenly had a platform to share it on. Over the years many people have made it, and many more have asked about substitutions for items in the rather lengthy ingredient list. I thought it was high time I revisited this idea to improve on it—after all, I’ve learned a lot since 2011!
Make it Up: The Essential Guide to DIY Makeup and Skin Care is now available at booksellers all over the world!