Making Lip Balm with Vegetable Shortening Christmas Project by Deborah Dolen -  Author of The Bathroom Chemist

 Beyond an oil based flavor, a touch of beeswax, and cute destination pots-a container of vegetable shortening is all you need to make a very good supple balm for your lips.  10% beeswax to 90% vegetable shortening-heated together make a nice balm.  20% beeswax to 80% vegetable shortening makes a firmer balm for balm sticks.  When pouring balm sticks, ensure the core is cold before you start twisting.  All of the melting can be done in the microwave using a large anchor hocking glass measuring cup.   Your creation is transferrred into destination pots or containers while still warm.    

For a kids project this is very simple, rewarding and fun.  And you can basically make 3 pounds of balm for $4-including the wax.  That is a lot of balm.  In fact that is enough to make 96 half ounce pots.  Why vegetable shortening?  Vegetable shortening usually is a hydrogenated form of soybean oil.  Almost all lip balms or balm sticks are made of a semi solid oil or fat, and over the last decade many originate from soybean oil.   

Flavoring Your Balm To secure an oil based flavor, you could go to the health food store and grab essential oils-such as peppermint, wintergreen, spearmint, tangerine, or even ginger.  You can blend these:  Spearmint oil and Wintergreen oil=Double Mint and Ginger oil and Wintergreen oil = Root Beer.  You may be able to find flavoring oils for chocolate in the cake section of any craft supply center.  This search may produce “chocolate” or “strawberry” and then you can mix to make chocolate mint and so on.  Vanilla flavor oil based is great of you can find that.   

Pipettes are one of the few things you need to transfer your warm creation and probably one of the only things you would have to get on the internet.

Coloring Your Balm

You can use cheap lipstick to tint your balm.  I use the end of a toothpick and swirl the color into the warm oil if I want to tint it.

Other Variations of Balm Base

Once you master the balm base, you can make solid perfume, heal salve-cuticle salve, just about anything.  In this cases you may want to up the beeswax to 1:1 vegetable shortening or even a fat like solid coconut oil. 

Materials: Large Anchor Hocking Glass Measuring Cup Metal sticks for stirring such as straight skewers used for grilling   For clean up simply wipe the glass measuring cup while still warm.  There is no need to try to clean wax residue with soap and water.  You can also wipe the metal sticks down the same way.   

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