How is Lip Balm Made?

Here at Balm Wallets we love lip balm. In fact, we love it so much that we created a product that maximizes the use you get out of lip balm and ensures that you do not lose it. However, when making products that go hand in hand with other products it makes you ask questions like how is lip balm made? If you are like most people you have probably never even thought about this question. It can be easy to buy products without knowing the back story of them or what goes in to the process of getting you that item.

In this video by Refinery29 we learn how Burt’s Bees makes their lip balms. Their main ingredient is sort of given away by the company’s name. Beeswax, which is used because of its superior moisturizing properties. Because of this it is used in many different beauty products around the world. Burt’s Bees believes that bees are magical. They know that because of this insect they truly have an excellent product. Their beeswax comes from Tanzania. They have a huge bee farm were their beeswax is farmed. After the honeycomb is collected it is boiled down to a wax and sent to Burt’s Bees factory in North Carolina. Here is where the rest of the process takes place. First the raw wax is filtered until pure. They are mixed in big tanks and each tank holds the equivalent of 100,000 lip balms. The main ingredients in Burt’s Bees lip balm are beeswax, coconut oil, sunflower seed oil, and peppermint oil. These ingredients are mixed together in the tank for several hours. After this the lip balm is poured into all of the different individual tubes. 500 lip balm tubes get filled per minute. After the lip balm is in the tubes, they enter a heating and cooling chamber to get the right texture and so they do not crack once they get sent out. Next the caps get added at a rate of 600 lip balm tubes per minute. Finally, the labels get put on. On each label you can see a code that can trace that lip balm back to its original batch. It is interesting to see how lip balm is made, especially because it is such an efficient process. These factories produce thousands and thousands of tubes of lip balm every day.

I feel like we take these tubes of lip balm for granted. They are such a cheap, essential, found everywhere product that sometimes we forget how much work is actually put into making them. Huge factories and even different countries all have a hand in producing lip balm. After watching this video, you will not be able to grab a lip balm off the shelf without realizing that you actually know where the product came from and how it was made.