Some time ago, I posted my easy homemade lip balm recipe on Bohemian Revolution, and got a great response from readers. This year, I’ve got an improvement on that recipe for you – just in time for that bitter winter dryness! As before, there’s no cooking – you just stir the ingredients together.
I got inspired by trying Elf lip glosses this year, and discovering they moisturized my lips terrifically. I did some research, and discovered the magic ingredient was mineral oil! I’d always heard mineral oil was bad for you, so I did some research. It turns out what’s used in cosmetics is nothing like the by-product of petroleum. Despite what I’d always heard, it does not clog pores and most people are not sensitive to it, and even those who can’t tolerate it on their faces may tolerate it just fine on the lips. Furthermore, mineral oil in cosmetics is “pharmaceutical grade” and – get this – people actually drink the stuff. Apparently it helps as a laxative or to keep you regular. So if it’s safe enough for drinking, it’s safe enough for my lips.
Enough of that – onto the recipe. You ready? This is so easy:
Improved Easy Homemade Lip Balm Recipe
- 1 part petroleum jelly
- 1 part aloe vera gel (I use Fruit of the Earth)
- 1 part mineral oil
Put the ingredients in a mixing bowl and stir them together thoroughly. You have to sort of break the chunk of petroleum jelly up as you go, but the mineral oil seems to help break it down (which makes sense – mineral oil is in cold cream, which breaks down waterproof makeup).
Cleanup Notes
Petroleum jelly is water resistant, so it’s not that easy to clean. To clean up your mixing bowl and spoon:
- Wipe off the leftover lip balm with a dry paper towel as thoroughly as possible.
- Pour a drop of a degreaser dish liquid like Dawn into the bowl, and get a little on the spoon.
- Rub the dish liquid over the areas that had the lip balm on them. You can feel it breaking down the petroleum jelly.
- Once you think the Dawn has broken down most of the jelly, run just a little bit of water in your mixing bowl and rub it around again to get some suds.
- Rinse.
Cost
That big tub of petroleum jelly cost me less than $3 at Rite-Aid for 13 ounces. I can find a 12 ounce FOTE Aloe Vera for $5 locally. And the 16 ounce mineral oil was about $2. So for one ounce of this stuff, we’re talking about:
- $0.23 for 1 ounce of petroleum jelly
- $0.42 for 1 ounce of aloe vera gel
- $0.13 for 1 ounce of mineral oil
- $0.78 for three ounces of lip balm
And that’s a lot of lip balm. But it’s not just about the money for me. It’s also about the fact that I haven’t found anything commercial that works as well as either of my homemade recipes. And since this takes maybe 10-15 minutes to make the batch you saw in the pictures, including cleanup, and those batches will last me for months, the labor is hardly even worth considering.
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