Thursday 18 October 2012

HONEY-COCOA BALM



I have some pure cocoa butter that I use for Dag's bathing water; it gives great moisture for the skin. I love how the cocoa butter feels on my fingertips when it's about to dissolve into the water, so I started thinking about making some sort of a lip balm out of it.

I am sure google could have provided me with some ready made recipes and how-to's, but I decided to just get on with it right away with what I thought would work.


For the balm I used a few pieces of cocoa butter, some cold pressed coconut oil and some honey. I sometimes use honey as a face mask, but I can tell you right away to skip it in this form when it comes to the balm. It did not blend out properly and went all weird.



Once I was at it I also added some of the other skin care oils I had around; almond-, argan- and jojoba oil as well as some rose water and propolis extract. Propolis is some sort of bee goo and is the honey in a t least a honey chap stick I have at home, now as I afterwards checked the ingredient lists.



I melted the cocoa butter and coconut oil in a jug put in hot water and then added the rest of the ingredients, just a couple of tiny drops per oil. I stirred with a toothpick and pour the mixture in a little jar to cool.



The result turned out very nice and smooth, although the next time I attempt this I will have to use less coconut oil; my balm turned out a little softer and oilier than I had wished for.

(I also attempted to make a chap stick of the blend. Which didn't really go all that well - I put one of my old sticks that had just run out in boiling water to clean the applicator and then later poured my mixture in it to cool. But before it did it slowly leaked out of the applicator on the table. So I'll just stick to small jars instead.)


6 comments:

Katja said...

Hmm, pure cocoa butter for the bath? Sounds good. Never herad of it for that purpose, but it might be worth to try? Where can you buy such stuff? - what kind of store? Hug to Dag!

Mi cámara y Yo said...

Delicious balm !!

The Freelancer's FashionBlog said...

Katja : you can get it on most eco- and health stores (over here at least) among the foods and "super foods", But it's SUPER expensive then. I bought mine from a beauty shop labelled as skin care. It's 100% cocoa butter so it is of course the same thing eaten or put on the skin... maybe it is just packed differently when it comes to skin care or so (?), it was also very much more affordable. I got mine from naturalme.fi; but the site is in Finnish. I'm sure you can find some online or in stores over there too! You don't need lotion afterwards if you put a little bit of it in the bathing water. I use it for footbaths for myself :)

Play Bingo said...

DIY lip balm?! Is there anything better than that? haha I think once i try this and I am successful at it, I will be making a lot with different flavors.

carrievintage said...

nice blog, I'm a new reader-follower :)

Rose said...

One year, I made lip balm for people for X-mas. They loved it! Because I was doing a big batch, I bought a bunch of new, empty, push-type containers. They don't leak! Mine came out a bit soft depending on how much cocoa butter I put in, but man, did it moisturize! And, I can certainly make it cheaper than the $4 a stick they charge in stores :P