Ye Olde DIY Tinted Balm

The year 2010 was a glorious time for YouTube beauty videos, and I was still on the scene. Everything--and I mean EVERYTHING--that could be DIYed was. There were videos on how to make your own dry shampoo, how to tea-dye clothes, how to create your own eyeshadows with pigments and bases, and any other "You can do it!" type of video you can imagine. Candles and straightening irons were used to heat up, fix, and depot so many products, it could make you dizzy. I get nostalgic for that time.

I'm not saying those videos no longer exist, or that DIY stuff is no longer being recorded, because that's untrue. But I definitely think the YouTube DIY craze has slowed down. And that's especially true for "do it yourself tinted balm," which was once the tutorial video du jour: every beauty guru worth their salt had a homemade tinted balm video.

So to recapture my youth, I decided to make some DIY tinted balm, inspired by my love of period pieces and my apparent inability to cough up $22 for Lipstick Queen Medieval.

I used to do this so much that gathering the tools of the trade was easy for me. I needed a candle and a lighter for my heat element, some balms (I chose Aquaphor and Nuxe Reve de Miel) for my base, something to add color (you can use just about any lip-safe pigment you want, but I went with Lipstick Queen's Saint Rouge lipstick), baby wipes and paper towels for clean up, and sterilized tools (LOL kitchen utensils). I always put everything on a towel in case something spills, and because I am the owner of a cat who is the world record holder for "most shedding done in a day."

Oh, and a nice container! This is my last empty Chanel Illusion d'Ombre jar, which kinda makes me sad. I always love using cleaned-out cream shadow jars for my DIY projects.

None of this was ever hard, to be honest, but here's what you do. You figure out how tinted you want your balm to be and how solid you want your formula to set. I wanted a very sheer red tint with a "whipped," jelly formula, so I used mostly Aquaphor. If I had to do percentages, I'd say my formula was 80% Aquaphor, 10% Reve de Miel, and 10% LQ Saint Rouge. If you want something with more pigment, use less balm and more lipstick, if you want a more solid finish, use a waxier stick balm instead of Aquaphor, so on and so forth.

Drop everything in to that large spoon and hold it over the candle. Obviously, this will make it melt. Once its all melted and incorporated, you can pour it in to your jar. I like to mix everything up with my butter knife then, just to make sure it's all well-incorporated, but that's a personal choice.

Be REALLY careful, because the spoon is gonna get super hot. I cleaned it off without burning myself by encasing a baby wipe in the towel; if I had just tried to clean it with a plain ol' baby wipe, things wouldn't have ended well.

That's it: ye olde DIY tinted balm formula! And I'm not ashamed to admit that this blogpost has me wanting to make even more.