Valentine’s Day means chocolate. Lots and lots of it. With all the sweet people in your life sure to have eaten enough chocolate to last them for the next month, now’s the perfect time to make them a different kind of chocolate kiss.

Have you ever smelled pure cocoa butter? Palmer’s and Queen Helene are nice, but the plain stuff is what’s really heavenly. Adding it to lip balm infuses the whole tube with a nice, chocolatey scent.

I’m more used to working with liquid and semi-solid oils, though, so figuring out cocoa butter proportions took a little time. While beeswax has a higher melting point than cocoa but, cocoa butter tends to add a unique “snap” (think about how biting into a bar of dark chocolate feels) that’s not always desirable in lip balm.

Cocoa butter has other characteristics that make it worth working through the tough recipe formulation: it moisturizes like nobody’s business and is incredibly shelf-stable due to the presence of saturated fats and antioxidants. And, as I mentioned, it’s DELICIOUS.

If plain chocolate isn’t your thing, you can always add a few drops of essential oil to spice things up.

A tad of peppermint essential oil makes a chapstick that tastes almost identical to an Andes mint.

Vanilla essential oil adds some depth to the chocolate and makes it taste a little more like brownies than raw cocoa butter.

Lavender essential oil adds a floral note that some people love mixed with chocolate.

While orange oil (along with lemon, lime, and grapefruit) is a bad idea because it’ll increase your lips’ sensitivity to the sun, you can get some citrus in with bergaptene-free bergamot oil.

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Cocoa Lip Balm

Rather buy than make? Head over to Etsy and pick up a few tubes.

If you’ve got a drop scale or any other cooking scale, click over to the the Cocoa Butter Lip Balm drop recipe for super easy instructions!

Materials

• Pot
• Heat-safe measuring cup
• Rag
• Scale
• Tubes or container for storage

Ingredients

In the spreadsheet blow, make your own copy in google drive (“File” > “Make a copy” > “OK”). Enter the amount of lip balm (in grams) you want to make in the pink box and the spreadsheet will auto-calculate ingredient amounts for you.

The second tab, “Price,” will calculate price of the final product based on the ingredient sources that I use.

• Olive oil absorbs slowly, keeping your lips smooth for longer.
• Avocado oil Avocado oil moisturizes skin.
• Coconut oil Coconut oil is antibacterial which can be helpful for chapped lips.
• Unrefined cocoa butter gives this tube of lip balm a deep cocoa-y scent.
• Honey adds a bit of sweetness and packs a humectant punch to keep your lips moisturized.
• Beeswax is an emollient that creates a barrier for your lips, keeping them moisturized. Too little beeswax will make a chapstick that won’t stay put and will require constant reapplication while too much beeswax will make a stick that’s too hard to glide over the sensitive skin on your lips.

Don’t have coconut or avocado oils? You can swap them out for any oil you have that’s liquid at room temperature.

Instructions

Heat all the ingredients in a double boiler (Place the rag in the water under the measuring cup to prevent the cup from rattling when the water boils.) until the beeswax has completely melted.

Pour into lip balm tubes or a tin and let sit before use.