Eco-Friendly Lip Balm Alternatives
Frugal and Healthy Ways to Keep Your Lips Kissable in Winter
Jan 30, 2009
Wintertime means chapped or dry lips. It can also mean chapped noses, and some cold sufferers may use lip balm to help soothe cracked mucous membrane. Lips are sensitive to cold, sun, salty foods, and continuous application can result in drying out lips even more.
Is Lip Balm Addiction Possible?
The most common additive is petroleum jelly, or a petroleum by-product such as mineral oil, or paraffin: these coats lips and is not absorbed by the skin. This means repeated re-application, and one’s lips become reliant on artificial moisturizers, and become unable to heal on their own.
Dr. Lisa Garner, a dermatologist at Baylor Medical Center states that over-moisturizing your lips may be a culprit: Once your lips become used to having a certain level of moisturization, they may stop generating moisture on their own.
In an article posted last year about lip balm addiction, Dr. Garner adds, "On occasion you may develop an irritation or sensitivity to one of the ingredients that may make your lips feel dry because you're actually having a reaction to the lip balm."
Are We Ingesting Toxins When We Use Lip Balm?
On top of that some toxins in petroleum by products are not only absorbed, but also often digested through lip licking.
Flavoured lip balms may smell and taste appealing at first, but there is the danger of a low level reaction to the flavouring, moisturizers and colouring. The flavoured balms run a risk of setting off allergies: Many use artificial flavourings that are neither natural nor particularly healthy.
Toxins to Look For In Lip Balm
A clue to the presence of ethoxylation byproducts like 1,4-Dioxane is when the ingredient list contains names like "myreth," "oleth," "laureth," "ceteareth," any other "eth," and also names like "PEG," "polyethylene," "polyethylene glycol," "polyoxyethylene," or "oxynol", said a consumer group that launched a study on organic products last year, published in Medical News Today.
Some brands that market themselves as organic have been tainted with Dioxane, despite their use of otherwise organic products. A safer and more frugal method of keeping your lips moist and toxin-free is to make your own out of something that you could safely ingest.
Natural Lip Moisturizers
The following items are considered safe, and have the added advantage of doing double duty as a skin moisturizer. When bought as a certified organic product, none of the items below are known to cause a reaction.
Some recommend mixing melted organic beeswax with jojoba oil as a remedy for badly chapped lips. Take a small jar or bottle and fill it with any of the following items and dab some on your lips when at work or at home.
- Unrefined shea butter
- Virgin olive oil
- Beeswax
- Vegetable Oil
- Jojoba Oil
- Thistle Oil
- Cocoa Butter
Making your own DIY lip moisturizer will help keep you and and the planet healthy: The fewer chemicals produced or released by commercial lip balms, the healthier we will all be.
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