Recipe #194: Red Lip Salve

Recipe 194: Red Lip Salve

This recipe looks surprisingly modern except for the butter, most recipes nowadays prefer to use oils versus animal based fats.

 In my attempt at this recipe I quartered this it for ease of replication plus I’d never get through a lip gloss using a half pound of butter. This is one of many recipes in the book for red lip colors, most use a variety of red colorants and animal fat bases to create a lip slave.

Gathering the ingredients for this recipe was easy, most herbal stores carry alkanet as it still is used in many small batch personal/spa type products. I found that the alkanet had almost no smell before it was cooked but had a smell like mild valerian when heated (no one else in my house noticed this so it might just be me).

Mixing these in the pan for the first few minutes was hard and required constant stirring.

The butter melted first. The recipe does not specify if the grapes should be squished or not, I didn’t but some of them burst in the mixing.

After about 15 minutes both the wax and butter had melted and the alkanet had brightly colored the mixture.

It was strained through a cloth.

Upon being set aside it cooled and hardened quickly. I separated it into two containers. One jar to keep and a cup to see how long it would keep unrefrigerated.

Once set and cool the lip salve hardened more than a modern chap stick but was still fairly easily applied with a warm fingertip.

The coverage is very sheer yet still pigmented. It lasts on the lips quite a while but has a slick feeling and smells a bit of butter.

After leaving the cup of the finished mixture out for nearly two weeks no change has occurred, it holds up well to time and can stand at least temperatures of 75F.

Overall this recipe was a great success, it produces a useable and stable lip colorant that suits modern use and needs no real adaptation (although if I was remaking this recipe for daily use I would add a lip safe flavoring because I’m not partial to the butter scent). I would recommend if you want to try this recipe to use utensils that you don’t mind getting stained from the alkanet!