How to make a natural lip scrub (guest post)

Today's post is written by Jilly who is an amazing formulator and a tutor at Formula Botanica.

This is an amazing formulation for a product that is very rare greatly needed. I have written several DIY lip scrub formulations for some magazines and blogs but this one has quite another niveau.

Read Jilly's detailed introduction and step-by-step tutorial here:

A lip balm in a tube is a fun and fairly easy project to make. In fact, it is the one that started it all for me a little more than over a year ago! Since then I am hooked and I am having a blast in my sober artisan kitchen lab . These little cuties never fail to put a smile on my face and I always have at least three of them ‘in the running’.

The most challenging part for this kind of product is to get the texture right; mostly depending on where you live. For a lip balm in a tube we will always need a wax to make it hard enough; but your ratio wax/butter/oil will end up totally different when you live somewhere in Europe in comparison to a very hot and humid climate. The latter will most likely need to make a combination with a hard wax too like candelilla. I live in Belgium and we have a very moderate climate: myrica fruit wax as a vegan option works perfectly, and if you are into bee-products beeswax will do the trick as well.

Now, today we are going to set an extra challenge! This is another excellent idea of Elham I had the chance to put into practice . We are going to incorporate scrub particles in our lip balm! Exciting, right?! I can tell you already it is a bit tricky, but we will see this in our procedure!

First some facts to keep in the back of our minds:

• A small comparison: the skin of our face contains up to 16 layers, our lips only 3-5! Also, our lips don’t sweat and the lips skin doesn’t produce sebum (the skin’s natural oil). So, it is easy to understand that because of these three reasons our lips often feel dry, are damaged pretty quickly resulting for example that you can pick tiny pieces of skin off them (like a snake).

• One of the ingredients of a balm is a wax; this will not only help moisturize our lips but it will also create an occlusive layer:  "locking moisture in ànd protecting against external factors" (think of cold temperature, heat, air-conditioning).

• Because the lips are sooooooo very thin, it is wise to keep your essential oils under 0,5% or less. Some EO’s can also be photosensitising; since a lip balm is used very frequently it is best to use those EO’s extra wisely and very sparely. OR, even better: if you want to scent/flavour your lip balm, you can also use a lovely macerated oil instead, like a vanilla macerated oil and/or cinnamon. Yum!

• Olives contain hard stones of kernels that can be ground down into a fine powder to gently exfoliate.

This time I have chosen my main ingredients around the same theme: fruits with a hard stone of kernel. All working together to nourish dry and damaged lips, to remove dead skin cells (those tiny flakes of skin) and to sooth and “heal” them. Here is a small round up:

• Myrica fruit wax: my favourite vegan wax to improve on the texture ànd to create an occlusive layer on top of the skin, locking in moisture + forming a physical barrier to epidermal water loss in doing so.

• Cocoa butter, unrefined: one of the most stable fats known. Adds not only richness to the texture, it also imparts an excellent skin feel (ànd it smells of yummie chocolate ).

• Apricot kernel oil, organic and cold pressed: fab for sensitive, dry skin and lip care. Repairs and nourishes the skin. Readily absorbed. Resembles sweet almond oil.

• Plum seed oil, organic, virgin: this is one of these rare oils that truly makes you happy when you screw the lid open; the scent is A-mazing! Sweet indulgence! Very high in oleic acid. An excellent oil for lip care.

• Peach kernel oil, organic, cold pressed: similar to almond and apricot oil but somehow finer and more luxurious. Wonderful for dry and sensitive skin and lips. Nourishing, skin protecting, emollient and relieves itching.

• Cherry kernel oil, organic unrefined: a silky kind of oil to pamper dry and damaged skin; it imparts a long lasting emollient effect.

• Sunflower Lecithin: as a skin feel enhancer and emollient.

• D-tocopherol: Vitamin E is an effective anti-oxidant; it both protects the product (lipids) and the skin and hair against oxidation.

• Rosemary CO2: a wonderful extract that has anti-oxidative, antimicrobial and anti- inflammatory properties. You can add it to all of your carrier oils, oil blends, serums, lotions and balms to prolong the oxidative shelf life of the ingredients and the final product, and to avoid rancidity.

• Calendula CO2: effective treatment for most minor skin problems and is good to use in all cases where cell regeneration is required. Due to its carotene content, it is excellent for healing chapped skin.
  The CO2 extract is a very high viscosity paste, so it is recommend to NOT add it directly to the formulating but to pre-disperse it in one of your carrier oils before adding it to the rest.

• EO bergamot BF/FCF free: one of my happy scents, it is soooo uplifting! I wanted to add a bit of zzzzzzing to all of the sweetness above. The combination with the scent of the plum seed oil is out of this world outstanding 

• Olive stone powder: fine yet effective powder to clean away dead skin cells.

Here is our formula!:

Phase A

35% Myrica fruit wax:

20% Cocoa butter

0,5% Sunflower Lecithin

Phase B

10% Apricot kernel oil

10% Plum seed oil

10% Peach kernel oil

10% Cherry kernel oil

0,1% Calendula CO2

Phase C

1% D-tocopherol

0,1% Rosemary CO2

0,3% bergamot BF/FCF free EO

Phase D

3% olive stone powder

Let’s look at our procedure!

1- Measure phase A, phase B, phase C in three separate beakers.

you can see our oil phase in the middle, without the calendula CO2

 as you can see it is quite thick and it doesn’t dissolve that easily in our carrier oils

so we are going to warm our beaker slightly (below 40°C). I have prepared 2 separate warm water baths: the one on the left for our carrier oils + CO2 with a temperature below 40°C; and the one on the right around 50°C to melt our wax/butter/lecithin (stir while this is melting)

the calendula CO2 is perfectly dissolved in our carrier oils! Let’s compare the difference in colour

3- When the wax/butter/lecithin is melted, stop heating, stir and when temperature is around 40° you can add your carrier oils/cal CO2 beaker (this beaker is already a bit warmed up because of step 2 so you won’t create a cold shock, perfect!)

4- Blend everything well together. Check your temperature and add the heat sensitive ingredients: rosemary CO2, tocopherol and EO. You can already see that our mixture is getting darker and that the viscosity is changing.

5- Now, our scrub particles. First step is to incorporate them in our balm, so we have to stir until we have a trace. To speed up this process I have put my beaker in a cold water bath. Don’t forget to stir!

because our balm contains a wax we have our trace after a short couple of minutes

6- Time to add our olive stone powder

7- It is not yet time to pour our balm into the tubes! We would like our scrub particles to be evenly dispersed in our balm so that they don’t sink to the bottom. The trick to do this (to suspend them evenly within our balm) is that we pour the balm after a heavy trace! I have asked my mum to help to take photos of this process because I was short of hands doing multiple things at the same time .

Okay, this is it! The heavy trace!!

8- Haha! And now comes the fun part: trying to get the balm in your tubes! This is how it worked for me:

pour into the tube until it reaches top (BUT don’t be mistaken, it isn’t completely full yet)

smash the tube onto your counter so the balm sinks to the bottom

with your other hand you keep the beaker in the palm of your hand to induce some body heat to make it a bit softer

pour again and repeat until you have filled your tubes

It can get a bit messy, so clean your tubes up and here they are!

And here they are after 24hrs in the fridge and adjusted to room temperature! The olive stone particles are really tiny but if you see real close you can see tiny specks evenly dispersed.

“Helper mum” received a tube of course and I have tried it myself too and I have to admit that I am a big fan of this product. The amount of particles is just enough, the trick worked and they are evenly dispersed, and they remove in a soft yet effective way dead skin. The other ingredients are really soft, nourishing and pampering. Mission completed and succeeded.

If you're inspired by this tutorial feel free to send us your photos and comment either per mail or to our Facebook page. If you post any photos on Instagram, don't forget to tag @SkinChakra.

BeHappy and have fun