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How to Make Beeswax Lip Balm with Infusions
- Mar 18
- 4 min read
Making lip balm is an excellent way to stretch your muscles for creating your own skin care products.
When you're not quite comfortable making your own homemade skin care products, there is a lot out there that can make the task seem overwhelming. However, starting with lip balms and salves is the perfect way to try your hands at making something useful and effective, without the concern of what is really going into your body.
After all, what we put on our skin is just like food and is absorbed straight into our bodies. If our lotions and creams have extra toxic ingredients that our bodies can't process, your liver still has to process all those toxins and burdens.
When I first started making our own skin care products, I quickly learned that making my own lip balm was far better for our health, budget and enjoyment. We liked our homemade goods better than the supposed best items on the market! Ours just simply worked better for us.
How We Began Making Our Own Skin Care Products
Researching ingredients, learning about local healing plants, and saving money were topics that began to really take shape in my mind. I began harvesting rose hips, Devil's Club bark, cottonwood buds, raspberry leaves, seaweed, calendula flowers, wild chamomile from our yard and everything Alaska had to offer us. I was set on making use of what God had provided in the land. My husband's aches and pains were decreasing, and I could see the natural medicines working in our lives. I am still elated about how plants and natural remedies can steadily rule over a quick band aid you might get "over the counter." Mind you, I understand that there is surely a place for pharmaceuticals, and they can work faster, for a little while... but often with more side-effects. Thus, my attentions turned to what I could safely harvest to offer deeper root-level healing.
Anyhow, I could go on for hours about how wonderful God's good gifts on the earth are. After all, He gave us responsibility over the earth and that alone is a challenge to me to discover all that lies within His creation in my local environment.
If harvesting isn't your cup of tea, so to speak, you can of course, purchase many of these wonderful ingredients rather easily and still reap all the benefits of a more natural lifestyle.
Ingredients for Beeswax and Nettle Lip Balm
3T coconut oil
1T castor oil
2T beeswax
2T olive oil (infuse with plant of choice)
What You'll Need to Make Lip Balm
- glass measuring cup with a pouring spout (2-3c)
- large pan or pot / or a double broiler set up
- ingredients
- 1 oz tins or lip balm tubes
- parchment paper
How to Infuse Olive Oil with Nettle or other Ingredients
Harvest or gather your ingredients. You can use pure clean dried tea, freshly picked dandelions, chamomile, calendula, dried nettle leaf, and honestly the list goes on and on. Just be sure you know what you're soaking and that it is safe and healthy to consume or place on your skin.
Add your ingredients to a clean glass jar. Fill to 1/3 or halfway with your dried or harvested ingredients.
Cover your ingredients completely with olive oil. After covering the contents with oil, being sure that nothing is sticking out of the oil (as the raised ingredients are likely to mold), and follow up with more oil a while later if it needs to be topped off.
Cover the glass jar with a towel or cheese cloth and seal with a rubber band or tie.
Let it soak! There are a few ways to let your oil soak up all that healing nutrients. You can let it soak in a sunny windowsill for a few weeks, in the pantry for a few weeks to a couple months or warm the glass jar on the stove with a double broiler set up or crock pot on low heat for a couple of hours. Best infusion, in my personal experience, is accomplished by placing in the windowsill for a few weeks.
Little Known Fact: cottonwood buds harvested in late winter to early spring are a natural preservative. Place a few cottonwood buds into any infusion and preserve it for up to 6 years!
How to Make Beeswax Lip Balm
Start by adding all of your ingredients to your glass measuring cup. No particular order is necessary.
Prepare your pan or pot by adding a few inches of water to the vessel. If you're using a double broiler, follow your normal steps for that process.
Place your entire glass measuring cup inside of the pan and place over low-medium heat. The main idea is that you don't get a raging boil around your glass jar. You want the boil to be slow and steady. Stir occasionally, as this helps the beeswax to melt. It can take 20-40 minutes for all of the beeswax to melt, depending on your stovetop. Be sure there is always enough water in the pan.
While your ingredients are heating up, prepare your tins or tubes on top of the parchment paper.
Once the pellets are almost completely melted, it's safe to turn off the burner. The residual heat will finish the work. Prepare to transfer immediately.
Using a hot pad, slowly fill your containers with the hot lip balm.
Let the mixture cool and then test it out! This is certainly the rewarding part! I leave the glass measuring cup with leftover lip balm on the counter for a while too, so as not to waste a drop. In our house we use the balm from the glass cup as long as it lasts.
Store your extra lip balm containers in the refrigerator for up to 6 months and enjoy it for seasons to come!
As always, we hope this tutorial serves your family well, empowering you to walk further in your handmade, homemade, and healing journey!
Love, the Nelsons
