DIY Avocado Lip Scrub & Balm

Today’s recipe is a guest recipe by Elham Eghbali. Elham is a cosmetic chemist and founder of Polymorphy consulting and SkinChakra. She is an artisan soap manufacturer, a supplier of cosmetic ingredients, an industry consultant and formulator and a tutor for almost 20 years. She runs workshops and seminars in her small cosmetics laboratory in Bavaria, Germany and elsewhere in the world for a broad range of participants from industry formulators to DIY laywomen. Visit her blog at:  http://skinchakra.eu/blog/ or follow Elham on Facebook at www.facebook.com/skinchakra

I hope you’ve enjoyed the first lip scrub recipe.

This is a more elaborated recipe based on the same principle. Here we pack sugar in a solid matrix of butter. It is much easier to apply this balm & scrub and guess what, you can prepare it in advance and keep it for about 6 months, you can wrap it and make an excellent present for a friend.

The recipe has a melting temperature near body temperature, it means as you apply the scrub with a mild pressure over your lips the butter melts and leaves a very pleasant skin feel. You’ll feel the butter melting if you keep it for a long time in your hands, but don’t worry, if you don’t live in a hot country with an ambient temperature around 30 degrees, there is no need to keep the scrub in the fridge.

I keep this recipe fragrance free (no fragrance oil and no essential oil). I do love avocado oil’s inherent scent. If you prefer applying an essential oil, add it right before you’re going to pour the butter into the mould cavities. Add max 2 drops for 50 gr butter. You can add something from the citrus family (lime goes well with the green color) or ginger or cardamom essential oil.

Since the matrix is only consisting of oils and butters and we have no water in this recipe, there is no need to apply preservative (don’t you love the idea?), BUT be careful, sugar can absorb water, it may change the consistency and may deteriorate your beautiful lip scrub. Prepare the scrub in as small moulds as possible and wrap the balm/scrub after each application in a humidity safe wrap, specially if the ambient humidity is high where you live. Tocopherol (Vitamin E oil) is added to the recipe both for its skin care values and as an antioxidant to protect lips and to avoid rancidity of avocado oil.

Sugar has a higher density than butter and oils and there are two ways to prepare this recipe:

1- As you see in the photo, sugar is set down, it means we’ve filled sugar in the mould cavities, poured the melted mix over it, put the mould in the fridge and didn’t touch it any more till the butter hardened. In this way there is a lower part of the cavity (which after de-moulding would be the upper part) with sugar and the lower part without sugar. I love this technique because of the beautiful colour and texture contrast, and it means that you have both balm & scrub in one single product.

If you don’t like this technique try this one, you know it certainly from other scrubs that you’ve prepared:

2- Add the sugar to the melted butter and mix thoroughly. Pour the mix into cavities and put the mould in the fridge, after about 15-20 minutes and as the butter starts to harden, take the mould out of the fridge, blend the mixture in each cavity with a little spoon or spatula to remix sugar and butter and put the mould back in the fridge. You may need to repeat this step once more depending on the cavity size. With this technique you’ll have a rather uniform distribution of the sugar in the form.