Lipstick for Mother's Day

Happy Monday! Mother's Day is coming up and I have a bunch of ideas for fun, handmade gifts that will make her day. Starting out, I'd like to share with you a lipstick recipe that I've been experimenting with. In my first attempt, I ended up with a wonderful colored gloss, but not quite hard enough for a substantial stick. For my second try I doubled the beeswax and it worked beautifully!

Here's the recipe:

1.5 oz castor oil
1.5 oz jojoba oil
1 oz white beeswax
0.5 oz shea butter
and a TON of color. Specifically, 1/2 tablespoon of cappuccino mica, 1 and 1/2 tablespoon of merlot mica, a pinch of copper sparkle, and a half teaspoon of titanium dioxide for opacity.

Oh, and put a couple butter knives in the freezer an hour before making your lipstick. I'll tell you why later...


Have everything out and ready to go before getting started. Grab packaging of your choice. Use a lip balm pouring tray if you decide on tubes. The stackable clear lip pots work great for layering different color options. Give mom a few choices. This recipe makes at least 25 lip balm tubes.


I started out by melting the beeswax down (for larger quantities of beeswax than this small amount for our recipe, use a double boiler to prevent risk of combusting your Pyrex dish in the microwave. Trust me, it can happen! Beeswax gets HOT.) Then, I put in the castor and jojoba oil and melt it down again for another 45 seconds to a minute. At that point, a put in the shea butter and stir, using the heat from the oils and wax to melt the butter. In goes the color. A tiny bit of titanium dioxide goes a long way. It is really important to mix the color and the titanium dioxide really well so as not to have any surprise flecks of pigment in your finished product. I used a mini whisk from the melt-and-pour tool kit to break down the color in the melted oils.

Here's where that frozen knife comes in handy. Dip it into the liquid batch to see an instant sample of your color. This is a great trick for candle making, particularly with soy wax because you end up needing a lot more color than what appears in the pot. The color shown here looks way darker than in actually is on the skin. Practice before pouring-- take a little of that hardened product on your frozen knife and rub in on your hand or on your lips to see if you are happy with the shade. Less is more-- you can't take out color once it's in, so start with a little and work up to a shade that is appropriate for your project.


Once you are satisfied with the shade, it is time to pour. I find myself remelting my batch as I go to keep everything nice and fluid, perfect for pouring. When you take out the lip tubes from the pouring tray after they've hardened, you have to top them off to get rid of the extra glop on top. The little white spatula that comes in the melt-and-pour tool kit works wonders for scraping off the excess. If you put your batch in lip pots, throw in a little lip brush to keep mom's fingers clean. That's it! For a list of lip safe mica's, click here.