I’m not one for makeup, and I never have been, but even I want a little extra something on occasion.
My daughter, who’s four, got a lip gloss as a gift. I was not very happy about the ingredients, so I started on a quest to make our own.
I saw some YouTube videos in which they mix pomegranate or berry juice with coconut oil to make a lip stain. This went against my understanding that water and oil do not mix. I was right. I was left with coconut oil chunks mixed in with pomegranate juice pockets.
Another try was using dried pomegranate peel ground into powder. This gave more of a lip scrub consistency and the color didn’t incorporate very well at all. Then I found a Youtube video with a recipe for lipstick. She used a standard balm recipe and color it with red clay and activated charcoal.
While talking to the supplier about red clay and activated charcoal for making lipstick she suggested I try oxides. These are a man-made version of naturally occurring iron oxides. This is where iron water and oxygen meet and create a kind of rust, oxidation of the iron. When iron is oxidized it creates strong colors: red, yellow, orange, green, and black. Powdered oxides are available for making cosmetics (you can read about their safety Here).
I started by making a standard lip balm recipe and adding the oxide to it and created a really great move colored lip balm. This worked really well, but I had to put my finger in it and so did my daughter (that’s tricky and also messy).
So naturally, I wanted to try a lipstick that I won’t have to put my fingers into.
The recipe is simple and does not have many ingredients. Coconut oil, Shea butter, beeswax, the oxides, and lavender essential oil.
Natural lipstick recipe:
1 teaspoon coconut oil
1 teaspoon Shea butter
1 teaspoon beeswax (can be substituted with cocoa butter)
⅛ teaspoon red oxide
1/16 teaspoon black oxide
2 drops lavender essential oil
In double boiler melt beeswax then add coconut oil and shea butter. Add oxides and essential oils. Mix thoroughly. Pour into lipstick containers or lip balm jars.
Thank you to my daughter for taking the picture (not bad for a four-year-old)
The mixture hardens very fast, so pour quickly and don’t worry if it hardens you can remelt it on the double boiler.
Enjoy, let me know how it turned out!
P.S. I highly recommend you wear an apron for this one. For some reason, I chose to do this wearing a white dress. It didn’t end well, for the dress… So next up is a post on a new sew less dress project I ended up doing to make a new dress.