Today we’re whipping up some beautiful stocking stuffers—White Chocolate Peppermint Vegan Lip Balm! Despite lip balm being inexpensive and easy to make, people are pretty accustomed to paying about $5 a tube for the stuff. This creates a lovely opportunity for you to become the lip balm fairy for all your friends and family! Create a few batches of lip balm early in the holiday season (along with other easily giftable DIYs, like soap) and you’re ready with gifts for any and all last-minute gift exchange invites. Score!

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I’ve been experimenting with quite a few new vegan waxes this year, and have discovered a few with more beeswax-y skin feels (as opposed to the glossy/hard skin feel of the “c” waxes). I found sunflower wax to be a bit of a compromise between beeswax and a c-wax; it’s got some creaminess to it, but it’s not as rich or tacky as beeswax, with a touch of a powdery skin finish. I thought I’d blend it with some beautiful oils and butters to create a lightly creamy vegan lip balm. If you want to make a beeswax version, check out this project.

Sunflower wax melts at 74–77°C (165–171°F), and I found this to be high enough that melting it in a water bath was pretty slow going. An easy workaround is to pop your beaker in a  93°C/200°F oven for 10–15 minutes. It works beautifully to melt everything; just be sure to wear hot mitts while handling the beaker, and make sure whatever you’re melting the ingredients in is oven safe.

Given the white chocolate peppermint theme, it’s not surprising there’s a solid 25% cocoa butter in this lip balm. It contributes some hardness, stunning chocolatey scent, and a pretty quick on-skin melt time. Coconut oil further adds some slippy gloss to the lip balm. I chose to use virgin coconut oil (which smells deliciously of coconuts)‚ and I find it really compliments the chocolate scent without competing with it. The coconut note rounds out the chocolate and makes it smell richer without being overtly “coconutty”.

I chose apricot kernel oil for our liquid oil, but there’s lots of room to play here. Other easy alternatives include sweet almond oil, safflower oil, sunflower oil, and jojoba oil. We mostly want something that’s liquid, absorbs at a fairly average speed, and will let the chocolate/mint theme shine (so avoid strongly coloured and/or scented liquid oils).  I recommend reading this post to learn more.

That little wispy blob is the cool down ingredients just after they’ve been added to the still-hot lip balm. A quick stir incorporates them and then it’s time to pour!

The finished lip balm is lightly creamy and lightly glossy, with a nice minty hint and a delicious chocolatey scent. It pairs beautifully with all kinds of things—the rest of our White Chocolate Peppermint theme, the Cranberry Orange Tinted Lip Balm I shared earlier this month, and many of the gift ideas I’ve shared in years past. Enjoy!

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White Chocolate Peppermint Vegan Lip Balm

Heated phase
3.75g | 15% sunflower wax
4.375g | 17.5% virgin coconut oil
6.25g | 25% cocoa butter (USA / Canada)
10.25g | 41% apricot kernel oil (USA / Canada)

Cool down phase
0.125g | 0.5% Vitamin E MT-50 (USA / Canada)
0.25g | 1% peppermint essential oil (USA / Canada)

Preheat your oven to 200°F (~93°C).

Weigh the heated phase ingredients into a small heat-resistant glass measuring cup. Place the measuring cup in your preheated oven to melt everything through.

While the heated phase is melting, weigh out the cool down phase into a separate small dish.

After about 20–30 minutes everything should be completely melted through. Put on your oven mitts. Remove the heated phase from the oven. Add the cool down phase and stir with a flexible silicone spatula to incorporate. In the video, I pop the hot beaker on the scale and weigh the cool down phase directly into it… I don’t recommend doing this as the beaker is hotter than it is after being in a water bath + the heat from the hot beaker is hard on the scale. 

Pour the liquid lip balm into tubes or tins and leave to set up before capping & labelling. That’s it!

Shelf Life & Storage

Because this lip balm is 100% oil based, it does not require a broad-spectrum preservative (broad spectrum preservatives ward off microbial growth, and microbes require water to live—no water, no microbes!). Kept reasonably cool and dry, it should last at least a year before any of the oils go rancid. If you notice it starts to smell like old nuts or crayons, that’s a sign that the oils have begun to oxidize; chuck it out and make a fresh batch if that happens.

Substitutions

As always, be aware that making substitutions will change the final product. While these swaps won’t break the recipe, you will get a different final product than I did.

• As I’ve provided this recipe in percentages as well as grams you can easily calculate it to any size using a simple spreadsheet as I’ve explained in this post. As written in grams this recipe will make 25g (approximately five standard tubes).
• To learn more about the ingredients used in this recipe, including why they’re included and what you can substitute them with, please visit the Humblebee & Me Encyclopedia. It doesn’t have everything in it yet, but there’s lots of good information there! If I have not given a specific substitution suggestion in this list please look up the ingredient in the encyclopedia before asking.
• I don’t recommend substituting the sunflower wax; if you do, you’re on your own. The guides here might be helpful.
  • If you want to make a beeswax version, check out this project.
• You can use virgin or refined coconut oil, or use babassu oil instead.
• I don’t recommend swapping out the cocoa butter as it is part of the theme. If you have to, another brittle butter (like tucuma) would be a decent option.
• You can substitute another lightweight oil like grapeseed or sunflower seed for the apricot kernel oil
• I don’t recommend swapping out the peppermint essential oil as it is part of the theme. If you want to leave it out, replace it with more apricot kernel oil.