Caity Healy | Lifestyle Editor

You’ve put together the perfect outfit from head to toe, you’re almost ready to head out the door, but at the last second you decide you need one last thing to tie your entire look together: the right lip shade. You could search through your mountain of half-used lipsticks and hope that one will be just the right hue to perfectly upgrade your style, but odds are, none are going to be exactly what you’re looking for. That’s when DIY lipsticks come in handy.

Simple to make and created specifically for you, these straightforward projects take only a few ingredients and only a couple minutes of actual time to get them created. Never again will you have to dig through endless tubes of lipstick to find the right shade – just make that shade yourself.

What you’ll need:

1 tube of lip balm

1 teaspoon of vanilla extract

¼ teaspoon of olive oil

1 Crayola crayon of whatever color you’d like (or a different brand, just make sure it isn’t too waxy)

Optional — an old eyeshadow you don’t use in a color you like

Instructions:

1. Empty the contents of the entire tube of lip balm into a microwave safe bowl. Peel the wrapping off of your crayon and add that in. Melt this in the microwave for about two minutes, or until the wax melts. Check periodically, as melting wax in the microwave can be dangerous.
2. Add the vanilla and the olive oil to the lipstick and mix with a fork or toothpick, as it will dry and harden on a spoon too quickly.
3. Pour the contents back into your lip balm container.
4. Allow this to cool, which would take about an hour or so.
5. Note: As an alternative to the crayon approach, you can use eyeshadow for a more matte look. With this option, follow all of the previous steps, but without the crayon. Between step one and step two, add as much eyeshadow as you deem necessary until you reach the right shade.

Instructions from instructables.com

Contact the author at chealy16@wou.edu

Photo by: Paul F. Davis