Lick Those Dry Lips (but not litterally!)

"My lips are so dry and I hate to use all the chemicals found in lip balms!" you say? Well, I live in the high desert of northern NV and can really relate to non-existant humidity and dry (cracked, bleeding, painful) lips! When we moved here I thought I would go crazy the first year or two and can't tell you how much lip balm I went through. Then I read several articles about how lib balm, when used excessively, can become "addictive" in that your lips become dependant upon it. They expect to be "fed" the moisturizer they need through the balm and basically shut down their own moisture production, actually making you need outside moisturizer more and more and more.

When I stopped using lip balm I was miserable for about a month with big cracks in my lips, then surprisingly they started clearing up and caught on to the fact that they were in charge of their own moistuization. In the past 8 years since then, I've only used lip balm a handfull of times, like when I've had a cold and had to breath through my mouth a lot. About twice a year I start feeling the over-dryness starting to come back and might even start to get a small crack. At that point I step up my water intake significantly and my lips soften and moisturize again within a week.

Sometimes if I feel I just must have some outside moisture, I'll also take a single drop of extra virgin olive oil (vitamin E oil would be great too) and rub that between my lips to get over an especially dry time. I just am careful that I only do that once in a very rare while and not get locked into the cycle of letting my lips get dependant upon the outside moisturization.

So my best advice is that if you can tough it out for a month or two, drink all the water you can, you may find that you don't even need moisturizer on your lips anymore. If that's not a route you want to go, we offer an Coconut Organic Lip Balm at AMM. It wouldn't give you a break from every potential allergen, but it does have a much shorter ingredients list than some you may currently be using: Organic Helianthus Annuus (Sunflower) Seed Oil, Organic Cera Alba (Beeswax), Organic Flavor, D-Alpha Tocopherol (Vitamin E), so that's another option to consider.