I live
in a city where the weather is dry all the time, even our monsoons aren’t humid
enough. In school, we used to carry around our little bottles of Vaseline that
used to leak and ruin our bags, and lip balms made their first appearance in
our town well into my teens. I used to think that a lip balm should be used
only when my lips begin to crack, because of which I have tasted my own blood
for way too long and laughed out loud with my mouth in the shape of a butt hole
because if I smiled any wider than that, my lips would most certainly turn into
the bloody version of Niagara Falls.
Around
my fourteenth birthday, I decided that it is high time I started using
something on my lips, mostly out of the fear that I might end up looking like
the Mouth of Sauron. I started experimenting with whatever I had at home. Lip
balms just seemed to sit on my lips, doing pretty much nothing. Ghee smells
nice when used for cooking, not when it is constantly on your lips, right under
your nose. The only thing that helped was my good old Vaseline.
As it
turns out, there is a reason behind all this- your lips get used to the instant
relief your lip balm provides and they stop building their own protective
barrier, making you reapply even more balm, thus creating a vicious cycle of
sorts. Basically, keep it simple, and you will be fine.
Everyone’s
lips react differently to different products- these are some of the things that
worked for me:
