My name's Jade and I'm a lip balm-aholic.

My name’s Jade and I’m a lip balm-aholic

I cannot be the only person addicted to lip balm. I can’t leave the house without a tube, nor can I bear to hit the pillow without a smear across my lips. I’ve rummaged frantically through drawers, and handbags and gloveboxes in search of sweet relief from the dry rub of chapped lips. I have a tube on my desk, another on the coffee table, one by my bed, three in my handbag, one by the bathroom sink and one in the freezer because it melted in my car yesterday. Lip balm is my ultimate essential; entire days have been derailed because I couldn’t find a tube.

I don’t have the driest lips on the planet—despite living in the desert and not drinking anywhere near the amount I should—but it’s a compulsion to reapply whenever it starts to wear off even slightly. Even then: my Nuxe reve de miel pot smells divine and feels luxurious but doesn’t offer the slippery slide a Labello can; my Sephora coconut balm is perfect for sports but doesn’t last overnight; Vaseline is best for long-lasting relief but feels sticky and I hate dipping my finger into the pot; EOS balms are easy to find in a handbag but smushing my face into a golf ball does more harm than good when my lips are actually sensitive. I digress. My point: I really shouldn’t need to apply lip balm as much as I do. So where has this addiction come from?

Lip balm’s ubiquity in a woman’s arsenal lends credence to the conspiracy theory that companies put ingredients in there to intentionally irritate lips, trapping us in a vicious cycle of reapplying it. More lip balm, more sales, so the theory goes. Some ingredients, like fragrances, camphor, menthol or salicylic acid, can irritate the fragile skin on and around the lips but this is more of an allergic reaction than a nefarious scheme by Big Lip Balm. The other problem? Occlusive products, like the petrolatum in Vaseline, form an artificial barrier on the skin which locks in moisture. When the barrier wears off, the lips feel drier—your natural reaction is to reapply the product. But while some ingredients can be potentially irritating, they certainly aren’t addictive—they don’t cause a physiological dependency in the way drugs, sugar or tobacco can.

Rather, it’s the behaviour that’s addictive. It’s compulsive: we can become pathologically and psychologically addicted. Even thinking about dry lips is unbearable for me; I’m giving my lip balm the side-eye even now. This behaviour is tantamount to an obsessive compulsive disorder: it’s all about soothing the itch, rather than feeding the dopamine dependency. Far less problematic than traditional substance abuse, behavioural addictions are habits, activities and rituals that provide pleasure or relief but can become obsessive. A lip balm addiction could be little more than a bad habit; but it has the potential to become detrimental.

Using lip balm shouldn’t interfere with daily life; if you have to go out of your way to get your fix, or struggle concentrating in meetings or enjoying activities because your lips are bothering you, you may be in the same club as me. Exposure to cold temperatures and dry weather conditions are the most common ways skin loses moisture, with the lips particularly vulnerable, so there’s no need to feel guilty about carrying a tube with you through the winter.

It’s not worth panicking though. The only way I’ll die from a lip balm addiction is if I’m hit by a bus running to the shop. I gave up smoking—let me have this at least.