Favorite Herbal Recipes

As an herbalist I often get asked what kinds of skin care products I recommend. My answer is to make your own. By making your own you needn’t compromise on ingredients. You can have exactly what you want in the proportions you want. I recommend starting with simple products and working into the more complex. For the next few blogs, I’ll share some of my recipes. These have been time tested . In the days when I grew and produced products this was one of my top sellers.

Lip Balm

Ingredients:

2 oz of beeswax (real chunks or refined pellets okay)
6 oz of coconut oil
8 ml of calendula flower oil (olive oil base)
6 ml of St John’s Wort Flowering Top oil (olive oil base) optional
10 drops of vitamin E (oil)
¼ tsp of raw honey
8 drops of tangerine oil (optional)

In a two cup glass measuring container add the first two ingredients. Set the glass container inside a shallow pan of water and melt the oil and beeswax together. When liquefied, stir in the remaining ingredients. Immediately dispense into appropriate containers.

The small round tins are nice, although I have filled individual tubes also. The recipe makes about sixteen small round tins or twenty-plus tubes. Since I no longer sell these, what I do is I fill a few containers, and then let the rest solidify in the glass container and refill the same tins later in the season. In a shallow pan of water, you can gently reheat the glass container with the leftover product. I purchased a Pyrex cup just for making lip balm, so that I could save my extra in the same container. Kept away from heat and light, this has a really long shelf life.