It is that time of year again when the heaters come on, the air dries out, and the cold winds blow. It is chapped lips season. Have you ever flipped over your lip balm and read the ingredients. I feel like I am back in high school chemistry class (shout out to Mr. Reeves). I recently looked at the ingredients in a tube of Nivea Kiss of Smoothness lip balm. It had over twenty ingredients. I could pronounce two, water and lanolin. By the way did you that lanolin comes from secretions of the sebaceous glands of wool-bearing mammals. In plain english.... sheep sweat. Yummy huh. I went searching for a truly natural non-animal sweat containing lip balm. I found many. Most of them had ingredients that I would have to go to a specialty store to buy. No savings there. I finally came across some recipes using vegetable shortening as the base. I have that in the pantry so away I went. This is the one I came up with.
1 tablespoon vegetable shortening
1/8 tsp olive oil
1/8 tsp vanilla extract
1 squirt natural honey not the cheap honey flavored corn syrup.
1 empty clean small container. I actually use an old prescription bottle. Anything you can come up with is fine as long as it is cleaned and dried before you put the balm in.
In a microwave safe bowl melt the vegetable shortening. Add the oil, vanilla, and honey. Mix well. Put into the cleaned container to cool and set back up. You can use any extract you like to flavor it. If you would like it colored use food coloring.
* I use this as a preventitive balm. I am not sure how well this would work healing severely chapped lips.
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