Activity Days: Homemade Lip Gloss + Gossip Lesson

Homemade lip gloss.  What tween doesn’t love it?  None, I say.  So, of course we had to whip up a batch for Activity Days.  But since we care about a message being a part of anything fun and crafty and cute, we paired the mixing of strawberry lip gloss with a lesson on the perils of gossip.

Let’s face it.  Gossiping is real.  It’s a part of just about every day in the life of a teenager.  Heck, it runs rampant in about every neighborhood and workplace in the world no matter how old you are!  Sigh.  I hate gossiping.  I hate hearing it.  But I really hate finding myself getting caught up in it.  It’s something I have to work at deflecting on a regular basis and this can be hard to do.  But it’s even harder for a self-emerging teenager to manage without a strong sense of self so I think that any reinforcement and encouragement in this area is a good thing.

Meet the Dubiens Tutorial

What better way to connect the idea of saying kind things than by making juicy lip gloss!  My beautiful partner Jessica took the lead on this one because honestly, she is just good at this stuff.  She is an amazing Paparazzi accessory saleswoman and always looks darling – down to her perfectly glossed lips.  And she’s nice, too.  So of course she would be great at teaching this principle to a dozen lovely young ladies.

This activity was simple.  A 15 minute lesson about gossip – what it is, how to avoid it, what to do when you’re in the middle of it and how to turn it into something positive.  “Reverse Gossip” was the big idea here.  When you hear something negative about someone else, turn it around into something positive to avoid the trap of spreading nasty comments.  Gossip involves three people – although the girls thought that it only involved two at first.  Then they realized that the third person is the one being gossiped about.  And since they had all been that person, they all knew how it feels and wanted to try and be better.

Next came the lip gloss making.  Jess kept it simple.  And cheap.  Activity Days is all about keeping it simple and inexpensive.  She used a post from Meet the Dubiens as a quick and easy tutorial for making lip gloss – petroleum jelly and kool-aid!  Now, I know that petroleum jelly isn’t eco-friendly and some people feel strongly against using it.  But like I said, we were looking for something simple and inexpensive and honestly, most of the recipes for homemade lip gloss out there require hunting down a wide variety of ingredients that we didn’t have the time or budget for.  So, if you choose to use a different recipe, by all means – go for it!  But this was a great option for our needs and it worked fabulously.

Just click here for the step-by-step instructions and some updates about how people were most successful with this craft.  For us, we started warming the petroleum jelly on the stove while Jessica was teaching the lesson.  You keep stirring and it will liquify.  Then it needs to cool down so that it is fairly cool and stays beaded if you drop some on your finger.  Then we used a wire wisk to stir in a packet of kool-aid.  Jessica added a little packet of Crystal Light flavoring as well to give it a little more kick and color.

We then scooped the mixture into little plastic containers – you can use lip gloss or bead containers.  Ours had a snap on lid and worked fine and they were 12 for a buck.  Sweet!  Using the printable in Meet the Dubiens post, labels were punched and added to the top of each container.  We then popped them into the freezer for about 5 minutes and tied it all together with this poem (found here).

The only thing I might do differently next time is attach the label after the container has spent time in the freezer because we had to re-glue some of them since the adhesive refused to work after getting cold.  But other than that, it was a resounding success and the girls were out the door in just under an hour.  Perfection.

Thanks to Jessica for a great activity and to Jill at Meet the Dubiens for sharing her great tutorial. It truly made this activity a lip-smacking success!

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