Lip Balm for the Win

Experimenting is nice, even if it is uncontrolled human experiments where the test subject is me. Okay, I knew there can't be too many side effects to experimenting living without a lip balm. Lip balm addiction websites say that if you think you're addicted to lip balm, it's best to live without wearing any lip balm at all. They say that in enough time lips will simply adjust and start to rehydrate themselves. I sure was addicted to lip balm so I tried their suggestion and you know what I found out? It turns out lip balms exist for a good reason!

It's generally well accepted that people with dry skin ought to use skin lotion. People don't talk about letting skin peal off until it learns to rehydrate itself. When I researched chapped lips, I found that good quality websites, like different public medical databases, say that some people constantly have dry lips and that even healthy lips can become dry due to temporary environmental conditions, like dry air, cold air, or excessive sun exposure. Perhaps lip balm should be treated like skin lotion - some people simply have dry lips and they need to apply something to keep lips from getting chapped. The only difference is that there aren't too many skin lotions which are designed to irritate your skin to feel even more dry. Lip balms do just that. Several common lip balm ingredients are RUMORED to irritate lips and thus increase the need to apply lip balm. (I discussed it here: Chapoholic)

When I started this whole self-experimenting, I had something like five or seven lip balms hidden throughout the apartment. One in each bag and in every room. I had to re-apply very often, sometimes every fifteen minutes. Still my lips were so dry that I desperately kept buying lip balms. I even bought one extra nice lip balm that a make-up expert recommended. She said it is very effective and lasts for a long time. She also said that people who buy it usually stop using any other kind of brands. In hindsight, I should have made the conclusion that they stop using other brands because they become addicted to this one, because this conclusion would have been the correct one. This extra nice lip balm cost roughly $20 and when I got home, I discovered that the package stated in very fine print, "do not use when pregnant or breastfeeding" and it contains menthol. This lip balm gives lips a really pretty shine though so I might eventually use it despite the menthol.

The experiment was this: If I stop using lip balm (especially the kind with irritants), will my lips become LESS dry?

So I stopped using lip balm and within a few hours my lips became chapped and aching. They were visibly swollen and very uncomfortable. I only held out for two days until I found a safe ointment that's not specifically meant for lips, so it's guaranteed not to have such ingredients, and it even promotes skin healing. I started applying it in the evenings for overnight treatment. It helped for a few days but not as much as I would have liked. I tried applying olive oil a couple of times because it's all natural and then I tried butter because milk fat is more similar to natural human fat, but neither olive oil nor butter is very good as a lip balm. Then I read that dehydration causes chapped lips so I tried drinking water each time my lips felt dry and it helped a bit but again, not as much as I would have liked. Besides, I still dislike drinking water and it's a struggle to drink even a liter of pure water per day. After a week of semi torture I started became fond of greasy food for all the wrong reasons - after eating it, my lips felt slightly greasy as if I had just applied lip balm.

The most effective method to help my lips was to wash them! My lips felt the most dry when I had eaten something sugary and then licked my lips "clean". It wasn't much better when I left my lips slightly sugary because then it dried and the effect was the same. So in stead of licking my lips, I started to wash them with clean water. This was helpful for a while but once my lips got visibly chapped, water didn't help one bit. My lips were getting so more and more chapped and even my overnight lip treatment wasn't enough to help them heal.

Eventually I said, "Screw it! I have naturally dry lips and I need to use a lip balm!" I researched what are the best alternatives for those evil Blistex and Carmex type addictive lip balms and I found that some people use pure vaseline! They apply it on the lips in the evenings and don't need anything else for the rest of the day. I kept researching and found out about many cases where people got horribly addicted to applying vaseline on their lips. Someone said vaseline is so unnatural it makes lips much less able to rehydrate themselves in the long run. After reading about too many people addicted to it I didn't dare to start using it on my lips daily. The ointment I've been using has vaseline in it so I didn't want to use that anymore either.

Then I read about the ointment Aquaphor by Eucerin. People on the Internet say it's absolutely the best alternative to regular addictive lip balms. I would take that information with a large grain of salt but Eucerin is a pharmacy brand that specializes in making effective yet non-irritating skin products. I went to a pharmacy to buy Aquaphor but even the pharmacy with the best Eucerin selection in Tartu didn't have this product. In stead I bought Eucerin's regular Lip Repair and it's perfect. It's got minimal amount of ingredients and none of the horrible ones I've read about. It's simple and it simply works. I wanted to start with something that's as mellow as possible so I decided not to try Eucerin's Acute Lip balm until I get really desperate.

Result of the experiment: I'm no longer addicted to lip balms... but I can't live without my Lip Repair balm! I only need to moisturize my lips once a day. My lips still get a little dry on occasion but it's not a constant problem anymore. While using a lip balm every 15-30 minutes is definitely an addiction, using it only once a day is called skin care.

Also I learned to avoid licking my lips , I learned that sometimes lips feel more moisturized when rinsed with clean water than they do after applying the wrong lip balm, I learned that all lip balm labels need to be read VERY CAREFULLY. The general rule is, that if it's sold as a lip balm, it will irritate your skin. There are very few exceptions to that rule so be careful or you might end up with lip balm addiction, chapped lips, and half a dozen evil lip balms which only make the problem worse.