| I was really inspired by an experiment some girls in my class did. They made lip balm, and I wanted to try it out on my own, using a different method. Since my lips are chapped a lot, I wanted to see if i could make something that can smooth lips and help the skin repair itself. Audrey, Indigo, and I researched online and found that lips have very thin layers of skin on top, so they are very vulnerable to dry weather conditions. Also, licking your lips makes the moisture evaporate faster, dehydrating your lips more than you wanted them to be. Lip balms- or lip butters, in our case, provide a moisture shield between your lips and the dry air. The oils in our lip butter are very beneficial to help healing and moisturizing our lips, as moisture helps lips heal faster. We used vegetable oil, for moisture and softening, vitamin D for giving you an important vitamin boost (and helps you gain beautiful skin), shea butter for natural vitamins and moisture. We also used crayons to make our lip butter the color we wanted. The crayons we used are nontoxic, meaning that they are very safe to use on our lips. After getting our ingredients, we melted them together, then poured them into our containers. It was really interesting to see the drying process, because it seemed to be a liquid for awhile. When you pour the liquid lip butter into the container, it is a liquid. By the time I got home, it was completely a solid. This is an example of changes of properties. When lip balm is a liquid and dries as as solid, this is called "Solidification". Solidification is a phase transition where a liquid becomes a solid because of a drop in temperature. My lip butter turned out to be a sheer pink color. I have been using mine a few times everyday over the past few days, and my lips are no longer chapped and are really soft. I'm excited because I now know the benefits of oils, and what they do to heal your skin. If I were to do this again, I would probably have done this experiment alone. I work a lot better alone, but I wanted to help out another group that had no points, so I let them join along even though I already had the ingredients. In the end, all they gained was disappointing results and I wasted my ingredients. I learned a lot about the benefits of putting beneficial oils and vitamins into makeup. I also learned that a lot of makeup companies put chemicals and led in their makeup, making me want to make my own makeup from now on. I will use my new knowledge of vitamins and oils when I need to make decisions about what's healthier about my skin. I would definitely do this again in the future. |