How to Make Herbal Lip Balm: A Simple Beginner Recipe

A lip balm is a salve that learned to behave itself. Same two ingredients — oil with a plant steeped in it, set firm with beeswax — only you use more wax, so it holds in a little tin and doesn’t run off your lip the way a soft salve would. If you can make a salve you can make this, and if you’ve never made either, this is the easier of the two to start with.

I make a batch every fall, when the wind off the strait turns and my lips crack within a week of the first cold snap. My grandmother kept a tin of it by the kitchen sink, and another in her coat pocket, for most of the years I knew her. I’ve been making it the folk way — by eye, by the warmth at the back of the stove — for the better part of thirty years now. What follows is exactly how I’d walk a neighbor through their first batch, standing in my kitchen with the kettle on.

Pick your oil first

The oil is most of the balm, so it’s worth a sentence. Plain olive oil from the cupboard will work, and generations made balm with nothing else. But for something that lives in a coat pocket through a wet winter, I reach for jojoba. It isn’t really an oil — it’s a liquid wax, close in makeup to the oil your own skin makes, and it keeps far longer on a shelf without turning. Sweet almond and olive are fine stand-ins. Coconut oil works too, though it firms up cold and you’ll want a touch less beeswax to balance it.

You can stop right there and make a perfectly good plain balm. Most of what a chapped lip wants is simply oil and wax holding moisture in. The plant is the part that makes it yours.

Infuse the oil, if you want the plant in it

Infusing means letting the oil sit with a dried plant until it takes on the plant’s color and character. For a lip balm I’d point a beginner toward calendula or plantain — both common, both gentle, both used on skin far longer than anyone’s been writing it down. Plantain is the low broad-leaved weed (Plantago) in every lawn and trailhead from here to the coast; calendula you can grow in a pot by the door.

One honest word on identification, said once: infuse only a plant you can name with certainty, confirmed against more than one reliable source and ideally an experienced local. Steeping a plant in oil doesn’t tame it — it pulls the plant’s character into the oil, the good and the harmful both. And dry your plant well first. Fresh plant carries water, and water in your oil is what turns a balm rancid before its time.

The slow way is the one my grandmother used. Pack a clean jar two-thirds full with dried plant, pour oil over until it’s covered by an inch, cap it, and set it on a warm windowsill for three to four weeks, giving it a shake whenever you walk past.

The warm way is for when you want balm this afternoon. Set the same uncapped jar in a small pan of barely-simmering water — a makeshift double boiler — and let it warm two to three hours. Keep the water at a bare tremble, never a boil; oil that gets too hot scorches and loses its virtue.

Either way, when the oil has taken on the plant’s color, strain it through a doubled layer of grade-90 cheesecloth into a clean bowl. The tight grade-90 weave catches the fine grit a looser cloth lets through — and that grit is exactly what shortens a balm’s life. Wring the soaked plant hard; there’s good oil hiding in there.

The ratio is the whole trick

Here’s the one number that separates a balm from a salve: a lip balm wants more beeswax. A salve I make at about one part wax to four parts oil, soft enough to scoop with a finger. A balm I take closer to one part beeswax to three parts oil — say a rounded tablespoon of pellets to a quarter-cup of oil — so it stays put on your lip and survives a warm pocket without going to liquid.

Warm your strained oil gently — back in that pan of hot water is easiest — and stir in the beeswax pellets until they melt clear. If you’d like a little sweetness, a small dab of honey stirred in while it’s warm is traditional and pleasant, though it can make the balm grainy if you’re heavy-handed, so go light.

Test it on a cold spoon before you pour

This is the trick that saves a whole batch. Before you fill anything, drop a half-teaspoon of the melted mix onto a cold spoon and set it in the freezer for a minute. That cooled dab tells you exactly how firm the finished balm will be. Too soft and it’ll smear — stir in a few more pellets. Too hard and it drags on the lip — splash in a little more oil. Adjust now, while it’s liquid. You cannot fix it once it’s set, and I have remelted more than one batch that I was too impatient to test.

Pour, cool, and label

Pour the warm balm into your small tins and leave them undisturbed on the counter to set — fifteen or twenty minutes. Don’t cap them while they’re warm, or you’ll trap steam and invite the very moisture you worked to keep out. Once they’ve gone opaque and firm, lid them and label each with the plant and the date.

A balm made from well-dried plant and clean oil, kept somewhere cool and dark, holds its character for a year and often longer. Heat and sunlight are what age it fastest, which is the whole reason for the metal tin over a clear glass jar. When it finally smells flat or faintly of old crayons, it’s done its work — make another.

Where the recipe ends and the knowing begins

The making takes an afternoon, and you’ve just learned it. Which plant to choose, when to gather it, how each one was traditionally used and which have no business near your skin at all — that takes longer, and it’s the part I care most about. A patch test on the inside of your wrist before you use any new balm is plain good sense, the same as my grandmother taught me.

Most of that knowing is what I put into my book, Pacific Northwest Medicinal Plants — 115 wild herbs of this coast, how to identify each one without guessing, when to gather it, and how the generations before us prepared it. The oil and the wax are the easy afternoon. The book is how you learn what’s worth steeping in them.