How To Make Hard Lotion & Lip Balm Plus FREE Labels

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What Is Hard Lotion?

Shouldn’t lotion be soft and creamy?

Sometimes, but if you make it from scratch and don’t add preservatives it will go bad relativity fast. Also some lotions can have a ton of ingredients. If you’re into making your own it’s fun to experiment with all of those different herbs and extracts. But what if you just don’t have dried rose petals on hand, or you really don’t have room in your fridge for anything else–let alone non-food items?

The Answer–Make Hard Lotion!

Hard lotion only has three ingredients: beeswax, coconut oil and shea butter. How’s that for simple? And the stability of these ingredients means you don’t have to store them in the fridge. They will last a while at room temperature. Using hard lotion is also a great way to add a protective coating to your skin and lock in the properties of the shea butter and coconut oil. This is where the beeswax comes in. It’s what adds that extra coating to your skin to help prevent cracks and also to protect against scrapes.

These three ingredients also happen to make the perfect lip balm, so it’s a winning formula.

You can gather these ingredients pretty easily, but it’s even better when they’re in a kit already measured out for you, especially if you’re new to making your own toiletries.

my friend Renee Harris over at HardLotion.com has put together this great simple kit for making hard lotion. As you know, when you make something yourself you control the ingredients. In this case you control how much of each go into your toiletries. Add a little more beeswax if you live in a warm climate or a little more coconut oil if you like your lip balm more spreadable.

The basic recipe is equal parts of beeswax, coconut oil and shea butter. You can substitute cocoa butter for the shea butter if you like. Add a little more beeswax if you’re making your batch in the summertime or you live in a warm climate.

The kit contains 4.5 oz beeswax, 4.5 oz coconut oil, and 4 oz shea butter. It also came with 4 lip balm tubes. Then of course it came with directions. Directions for making 4 different things–hard lotion bars, lip balm, hair butter and diaper rash cream. So I had to make some decisions…

I decided to make the hard lotion bars and lip balm. I don’t currently have a baby so I don’t need the diaper rash cream, but what a great gift that would make. I’ll get another kit and try the hair butter another time.

All you need to do is measure out your three ingredients and melt them in a double boiler. I don’t have a double boiler so I used a measuring cup and a pan filled half way with water over medium heat.

Now, here’s the problem.

Well, problem might be too strong of a word. The thing is you can add essential oil to the mixture for aroma therapy or just fragrance. I wanted to make hard lotion bars with different fragrances. Adding the oil to the entire mixture wasn’t something I wanted to do, although you can if you like. Adding the oil after you have poured the hard lotion mixture into your molds is not really and option because the bars set really quickly. Too quickly to get all my oil bottles open and drops counted.

So while the lotion mixture was melting I counted out the drops to my blends and placed them in the molds (see my essential oil blends below). The only downside to this is I wasn’t exactly sure how many molds would be used. So adding one essential oil blend to the entire batch is safer if you don’t want to waste your essential oils. I could have taken the time to measure the volume of each mold and do the math, but I really didn’t want to.

I use Spark Naturals for my essential oils. (Don’t forget to use coupon code AWCOW to get an extra 10% off)

Here is the lotion mixture after it melted.

I did take the time to measure out the volume of the lip balm containers. I had 4 so that was about .5 ozs of liquid mixture. I wanted to put peppermint essential oil in the lip balm mixture so I measured it out then put it back in the pan with the simmering water until I was finished pouring the lotion bars.

I used this mini-muffin pan as a mold. You can use a fancy silicon mold if you like or whatever you have laying around (ice cube trays work well).

Since I didn’t have a chance to stir the essential oils in before I poured the mixture. I gave each lotion bar a quick stir with a toothpick before it hardened.

Then I went back to the stove and added the peppermint oil to the lip balm mixture. I put 3 drops for .5ozs.

The kit from Made On (HardLotion.com) comes with this great plastic dropper that holds just enough to fill a lip balm container.

Filling the lip balm containers was actually easier than filling my muffin pan.

Fill the container half way then wait until you see the lip balm start to harden before filling it the rest of the way. See the one in the middle is ready to be filled all the way.

Perfect peppermint lip balm with no additives or preservatives.

Here are my finished lotion bars. To remove them from the muffin pan I stuck it in the freezer for a few hours then turned it over and gave it a good bang. They all came out easily.

Both the lip balm and lotion bars were so easy to make that I would definitely consider making them as gifts. You can store the lotion jars in an old tin or my favorite container a Mason jar.

Download these labels so that you can write the flavor (fragrance) of your lip balm on the label and stick it on the tube. These are Avery 8167 address labels. There are labels especially designed for lip balm containers but they cost a lot. You might need to add a bit of clear tape to these labels so it wraps around the tube, but even with the tape you’ll save a lot of money going with the address labels.