more goodies from the hive: lip balm

Probably the Grape Nuts commercial from my youth has affected me more deeply than I'd like to admit ("Many parts are edible").  And stories about native peoples and farmers and pioneers who wasted not any part of an animal they'd killed, using every bit for some purpose.  So when I fell on this recipe for lip balm that uses beeswax and honey -- two items we have in abundance around these parts -- this County Mouse had to have a go.

Giving credit where credit is due, recipe is courtesy of www.honey.com -- Honey-Kissed Lip Balm. 

The ingredients are simple: 1 cup of almond oil, 1/2 cup beeswax, 2 Tablespoons honey.  Naturally, I made some edits.

- almond oil.  I had under 4 ounces of this, oil that I'd bought when I was super-ayurvedic for 5 minutes and applying warmed almond oil to my skin before showers daily.  I don't know when the heck I had time for that, and clearly I didn't do it long enough to use more'n about an third of an ounce.  So almond oil + some baby massage oil that included almond oil, jojoba oil and some fragrance, but which I figured I could throw in there (if for no other reason than to clear clutter from under the sink), topping off the 8 oz with pistachio oil from sumbody.  Mmmm, love that place.

- beeswax.  The recipe calls for beeswax from a craft store.  Mine was rinsed, crushed from a recent harvest, but still not purified.  

- honey.  no problem there. I have tons of it.

From there, it's a cinch.  Oil + wax in microwave safe bowl for a 1 minute, stir in the honey, pour into darling little tins.

A note on tins: pre-planning is everything to Country Mouse.  These tins were ordered from Papermart on line last weekend and arrived yesterday.  I'll figure out labeling once I'm sure this worked!

But check it out.  Here's the mixture poured into the tins, in which you can see how un-uniform my effort is, probably because I hadn't purified the wax ahead of time, but I still think it's fantastique!

 And the cooled, almost-final product:

Dude, those are freakin' municipal-caliber lip balms right there, like you'd buy in a store.  And it took, sure a little planning, but mostly only about 10 minutes of melting and careful pouring to pull this off.

Now, let's be real: these do not represent a business idea.  Home-made beeswax and honey lipbalm is not a financial plan.  But still I'm stoked because I made something out of things we already had laying about, and now I have more things to give away when I see my friends.  Not just honey, but now also honey-kissed lip balm.

Yay!

Comments

[Martine]

Blissbug all the way! xo