Sunday Soap Case: Sugar Lip Butters Rock My World!

Sunday Soap Case:

Adventures at Freighthouse Square (and some news on a sweet new product).

It’s Sunday and it was so beautiful this weekend! The Soap & Clay family spent the past few days chasing Pokemon, taking the bulldog on adventure walks, and exploring Tacoma’s Historic Freighthouse Square.  This is a pretty amazing building filled with incredible food (they have an international food court; anything you could possibly want in one space. Bad. Ass.), adorable treasure and collectibles shops, and some amazing artwork. I spent an afternoon chatting with two of the local artists from Freighthouse Square’s art gallery, Mike Juetten and Lucy Schwartz.

Mike Juetten’s paintings and glass work.

Mike’s fused glass artwork had me oohing and ahhing (while Mr. Soap & Clay talked muscle cars), and Lucy showed me an amazing watercolor technique wherein she uses soap to texturize and color the canvas. If you’re in the Tacoma area and want an adventure that’s guaranteed to please, stop by the Freighthouse and mingle. You’ll make some new friends, learn some new things, and find hidden gems tucked away in corners of the shops.

Lucy Schwartz.

While I always enjoy family adventures, I made sure to carve out some time for work, as I have a TON of it to complete right now. Most pressing has been prep work for a few events. Soap & Clay will be at Redhook’s Moonlight Cinema on July 28th as part of Oddmall’s Vendor Village. A night of beer, Bowie, and a moonlight viewing of Labyrinth – three of my favorite things! After that, we will be taking a small break before Tacoma’s Hilltop Street Fair on August 27th. This street fair always draws an amazing crowd, so I’m looking forward to mingling with Tacoma’s residents.

In addition to all the prep work, I spent some time updating the website. I’ve added a few new products, including men’s shaving soaps, aftershave balms, and today’s Sunday Soap Case topic: Sugar Lip Butters. Read on for some sweet information on a sweet lip treat!

Sugar Lip Butters

I’ve been working on the lip butter line for a few months, now. Being a lip balm aficionado, I was pretty picky when it came to recipe formulation. The goal was a medium weight, nourishing balm with great staying power. Also, the consistency had to be just so; if a balm is too soft I end up with more on my finger than I’d like (wasted product es no bueno), but I don’t want to spend more than a nanosecond swirling my finger across the balm before applying. I’m very interested in the repair qualities of high-end balms – knowing that the silky smooth butter blend on my lips is also delivering skin loving EFAs and vitamins makes me happy.

Once I had worked out what butters, oils, and extracts to use, I decided to take it up a notch. I’ve been in love with a certain sugar lip butter for quite some time – it’s sweet, exfoliating, and makes my lips feel amazing. I almost never buy it, though. Because it’s $28. For a tube of lip balm. I don’t get it. So I decided to play with sugars in my butter pots to see if I could manage an exfoliating balm that’s gentle enough to use daily (or hourly, depending on your application preference).

The Line-up

I use a cocoa and mango butter blend for these balms (with coffee butter included in the Java pot), because both of these butters are great for dry and chapped lips and have the added benefit of repairing damaged skin and fine lines. They’re also a little bit on the firmer side with a slightly higher melting point (which means they stay firm at room temperature), which helped with the not-too-hard, not-too-soft consistency I was after.

For the oils, I settled on avocado and argan. Avocado oil is nutrient rich, ultra moisturizing, and helps restore the lip’s natural pink color (which is cool, amirite?). Argan oil is also super moisturizing and works to heal skin but is also one of the best anti-aging oils out there; it’s a deep penetrating oil that works to minimize fine lip lines. I also infused the balms with extra Vitamin E to up the moisturizing properties without creating a greasy product.

Now for the sugars. I played with a number of varieties and ultimately settled on a brown sugar and glycerin blend. This blend results in a mild exfoliant, safe to use multiple times a day that plumps lips and assists in cell turnover. This was a bit of a finicky process; too much sugar and the balm ended up waxy and scratched the lips, too little (or added at the wrong temperature) and it all but disappeared in the batch.

The end result is a solid lip butter with a slight grit (that’s the sugar) that melts on contact with skin and delivers exceptional moisturizing, nourishing, and plumping butters and oils. It’s also incredibly long lasting – I find myself reapplying less often than usual since switching to the butter pots. Would you like to try one for yourself? Of course you would! Enter coupon code LIPSLIKESUGAR at checkout to receive a sugar lip butter on the house. Offer expires on Sunday, July 24th, so hurry!