If you love lip balm like my wife, you probably have them lying around in places where they should not be. You can make them in any flavor or color; however, making them sweet can sometimes be tricky. So, in this article, we’ll discuss how to sweeten lip balm the right way.
How to sweeten lip balm? Adding a tiny amount of sweeteners like stevia or honey and a hint of essential oils will make your lip balm sweet. Sugar is not recommended because it does not dissolve well and will make your lip balm gritty.
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If you are used to making lip balms at home, making the same over and over again surely would be boring once you know your way around making personalized balms. So adding flavors makes this process much more fun. And you don’t have to worry about the process, it’s surprisingly easy to make a sweetened balm, and you require very few ingredients to do so.
How Do I Make My Lip Balm Taste Sweet?
How to add flavor to your lip balm or which type of sweeteners can be added will be discussed further in the article. But before we jump in, it is crucial to keep in mind that your lips‘ hydration is the ultimate goal here, though, and your balm should not function to do the opposite.
There are essential oils, flavorings, and food ingredients that also give a sweet touch to the balms if added in adequate amounts. But in reality, you can use quite a lot of sweeteners; however, if you don’t know the right amount, they most likely won’t work or make them way too sweet.
Sweeteners like powdered stevia, honey, or sugar, add a little grainy effect due to the powdered nature and its viscosity, but if done correctly and added in the right amounts, you will probably never ever go back to buying the balms stacked in the stores again.
If you wish to go experimental with sweeteners, you’ll need to look into a prior set of information available—their composition, shelf life, skin-friendliness, and so on. Understanding every attribute of sweetening agents becomes necessary.
At the end of the day, your lips are thin layers of delicate skin that need to be carefully taken care of, and that is one factor you can never put at risk.
Avoiding stores brought balms and experimenting with natural and organic materials can go a long way in personal care.
How Do You Add Flavor To Lip Balm?
This has to be everyone’s favorite part of creating lip balm at home. Blending in your favorite flavors, infusing the wax with exotic smelling ingredients, DIY can be so much fun!
Pick up your base for the balm, be it moisturizing Shea butter or plain wax. Melt it, add your oil, and start stirring. If you wish to add flavor, you can add it now. And that’s about it, you pour it and let it cool.
You could experiment with the gazillion flavors that could come rushing to your mind. Be it mint chocolate, pink raspberries, cocoa, citrus, lavender, simple fruit essence.
Most sweetened balms from the stores are not flavored or sweetened. They’re simply sprayed with food-safe fragrances that give the perception that they’re naturally crafted.
What usually adds the rich flavor to lip balms are the essential oils, and there’s a wide range of them available in the markets and online stores. Particularly, note the kind of oil you’re getting and avoid any sorts of phototoxic or inorganic oils.
In case you end up purchasing skin-sensitive materials (citrus, lactic, and so on), make sure you dilute the chemicals through steam.
Mix in a tiny amount of diluted oil as you’d be reapplying it multiple times on your lips and wouldn’t want to risk any irritation caused due to excess oil.
Can You Put Sugar in A Lip Balm?
Most lip balms’ consistency is buttery, so adding water-soluble products such as refined sugar would not be usually recommended. You might end up with gritty bits of sugar stuck to your lips and absolutely no hydrating effect, which in the end, would make using a lip balm pointless.
However, if you insist on trying sugar, here is how you could do it:
Grind the sugar into an extremely fine powdery form (very important). Disperse a little bit of sugar into the oil (castor/coconut) before mixing it with the balm, and it would reduce the degree of grittiness. Sugar will not dissolve in oil but only disperse, so if you can dissolve it before adding it, this might help, but I must admit, you’ll most likely never get rid of the grittiness.
On the other hand, many people have suggested honey as a clever alternative to sugar sweeteners. Honey, being water-soluble, would require an oil emulsifier and many other products added to it. So if you wish to make it all-natural, you might want to take honey out of the lip balm formula due to its hydrophilic nature.
It tends to absorb water from the atmosphere and also requires external preservatives, which is highly undesirable on the skin, particularly if you have bitter experiences with allergens.
Can I Use Stevia Sweetener for Lip Balm?
Stevia is a healthier and much-refined alternative to sugar.
A natural sweetener extracted from the Asteraceae family’s stevia plant consists of way fewer calories than sugar and yet tastes sweeter. Almost as much as 30 times sweeter than the usual granulated sugar.
This is why you only would have to add a tiny drop of stevia to your balm to get the sweeter most taste on your lips. Since it’s a small amount of liquid stevia (about 0.5g in 3ml of carrier oil) that’s usually used, the balm’s consistency also doesn’t change from being buttery to a lip scrub.
To get a smoother texture and enhanced flavor, you could also add a pinch of Maltodextrin (corn syrup solids) to the melted base. It’s modified starch extract, so you’d still stay on track with going au natural on your lip balm ingredients.
Unless you’re freaked out about risking the road to diabetes, dust in the starch along with the liquid stevia, and you’ve got the perfect little pot of sweetened lip balm.
Can I Use Food Flavoring In A Lip Balm?
Of course, you can! But do not go crazy with the amount of flavoring. Take a stroll across the baking and candy sections, and you’d find tons of sweet and mild options.
Always check in with the ingredients and their safe lip characteristics. If you’re confused, just google up the ingredients and check if they’re used in amounts approved by the Food Safety and Regulatory Authority.
Not all sorts of food flavors or colors would go along with your skin type, so if you’re opting for them, make sure you choose wisely. Food colors also require specific emulsifiers as it doesn’t mix with beeswax or oils.
Just like the essential oils, these all go into the balm in very little amounts. Experiment with tiny amounts, and if it doesn’t turn out as you had desired, you could always melt it again and add more flavors.
To Sum Up
The cute colorful boxes have always been everybody’s eye-catching ones at the cosmetic stores. If you wish to add more color and flavor to your lip balms, you can try these easy tips.
Give your lips a refreshing as well as sweet moisturization throughout the day!
