Valentine Gift Ideas : Kool-Aid Lip Gloss

A lazy Sunday morning and Princess Cupcake crawls in bed with me. She snuggles under the covers and plops her shaggy head down on Daddy’s pillow and gazes deep into my eyes. I could stay like this all morning and am dreading her asking me for milk — which means I have to get up. Instead, the first thing to spill out of her mouth is,

“Mom. What are we going to make today?”

Aww. I nearly melted. “I don’t know sweetie. What would you like to make today?”

“LIP GLOSS!”

Other than the ferocity of the reply, I can’t say that I’m totally surprised. We started this little experiment on Friday when she had a day off from school. Keep in mind, she is almost 3 now, and LOVES, LOVES, LOVES to play with make-up. So when I asked her if she wanted to make lip gloss, she talked about it for a full day before we could get to it. She even told Daddy about it before I could share that little gem of an agenda item with him — and he was a bit, um… wary about our upcoming project. And very glad that he was going to be at work I might add.

Never-the-less, we had shopped the night before for our only three ingredients that we needed (Vaseline, Kool-Aid and containers) and this is how our first attempt went:

We learned a few things along the way:

1. One cup of Vaseline makes a LOT of lip gloss. You need waaaay more than 10 containers.
2. You can get lip gloss containers like you see in the video for $.99 each at Container Store — but you can also get smaller containers that don’t screw on but come in super fun colors at the same store for MUCH less. Thanks to my BFF who told me about them,  we got these on our second go-around, otherwise this could have been a very expensive project to do on a whim.

1. Don’t count on the colors of Kool-Aid to coordinate intuitively with the color of your lip gloss. Strawberry came out purply-black. Tropical Punch came out purply-black. Grape came out purply-black…
2. I didn’t think the Kool-Aid gave it enough flavor so we went to Michaels and purchased Candy Flavoring to add to the recipe. Princess Cupcake came up with the combinations. We made Tropical Peppermint (Tropical Punch Kool-Aid + Peppermint Candy Flavor), Grape-Cherry (Grape Kool-Aid + Cherry Candy Flavor), Stawberry (just the Kool-Aid), and Citrus Mint (Lemonade + Orange + Creme de Menthe Candy Flavor — I know, like wowza.  See more on that crazy combo below.)
3. How did I know how much Candy Flavor to add? Ha, ha, ha. Weeelllll…. the label says to add “to taste.” Yeah, you taste scalding hot petroleum jelly and tell me if it’s got enough flavor in it! I just added until I could smell it. I got braver as I went along and I think that worked out better for us.
4. Lemonade Kool-Aid will not color your lip gloss much differently than the color of Vasoline and it barely tastes like lemon, which is a big yuck in my book. (Why bother?) So we redid the Lemon version by remelting and adding  Orange Kool-Aid and Creme de Menthe Candy Flavoring (her choosing). It now about knocks your socks off and makes your taste buds curl until your lips pucker. Princess Cupcake loves it. It also is strangely pink. It’s gritty and tangy and it’s definitely a kid thing, not a beauty thing. You will not find this at Sephora anytime soon.
5. The worst part about this project is the labels. They should be part of the charm of it, but they are just a pain in the you-know-where. I made them in word art on the computer and added a sharpie heart in the middle of circle text. I couldn’t find a circle punch in my hoards of scrapbooking supplies and refused to buy one so I hand cut them out. Like I said, pain in the A–! Especially when you now have three size containers, argh. Leave them off if you can!

When it was all said and done, we made 46 lip glosses and Princess Cupcake proudly told me and Daddy that she was going to give them to EVERYBODY! She is having a ball trying each of her flavors on her and her babies. I dare say she had just as much fun choosing who was going to get which colored container, in which shape, and which flavor, writing on the gift tags and wrapping them up in Valentines bags. She loves to give presents so the joy for me is in watching her do the delivery with a grin from ear to ear.

And secretly — I can’t wait to see the lip pucker on that Citrus Mint!

Here’s a couple photos of her presents:

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