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Lip care
All Containers›Shop by use case›Lip care›What goes wrong›Too softShop all lip care →
What goes wrong

Too soft

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

A soft balm is a returns problem rather than a quality one, and it is seasonal.

How it shows

The top rounds over in use. The stick mushrooms when wound up. In a warm delivery van it slumps against the side of the tube and sets there.

The worst version arrives as a customer photograph of a tube with the balm collapsed at an angle, and that is a batch you will be replacing.

The causes

Too little wax for the oil and butter load.

A soft wax alone, with nothing harder in it.

A very soft butter at a high percentage.

And ambient: a formula fine at 20 C and unfit at 32 C is not a faulty formula, it is a formula with the wrong window for where it is being sold.

The fix

Raise the wax by two or three percent and retest. Small steps: wax has a steep effect and it is easy to overshoot into drag.

Or hold the wax total and move part of it to a harder wax. A couple of percent of carnauba lifts the melting point noticeably without much change in feel.

Or change the butter to a harder one, which fixes softness and graining together.

Deciding the window first

The real fix is upstream. Decide what temperature range the product must survive, write it into the formula record, and test every batch against it rather than against the bench.

A maker selling at summer outdoor markets and shipping in July needs a different formula from one selling into a ski town, and the honest answer is often two formulas rather than one compromise that disappoints in both places.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for lip care, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation and FDA guidance named on each page, not from a laboratory or a legal practice. Whether a particular formula and a particular label make a cosmetic or a drug is a determination about your product, and this is not that determination.