Plain Lip Balm

Details

An unflavoured, unscented lip balm. Five ingredients, listed below with percentages that add to 100. Start with the fact the category avoids. You eat a lip balm. Lip skin has no stratum corneum worth the name and no sebaceous glands, and whatever you put on it goes into your mouth over the following hours. So five ingredients here are five things you are eating, and all five are foods or food-grade materials. That single fact is why this one has no flavour in it, and the reasoning runs the other way from how the market plays it: a flavour makes you lick your lips, licking removes the film and evaporates, evaporation dries the lip further, and a drier lip needs more balm. It is a genuinely self-sustaining product design and it is everywhere. The two other cheats are worth naming. Menthol, camphor and phenol turn up in a lot of medicated lip balms and produce a cooling that reads as relief; all three are irritants on a mucous membrane and they are a substantial part of why some people cannot put a lip balm down. And petrolatum, which is the standard base, sits on the lip and does nothing except sit there, which is fine, but it is a petroleum fraction and this house does not use them. What replaced it is castor oil at 30 percent, which forms a better film than any other plant oil at this job because of its ricinoleic acid content, and which is also the reason the balm has a slight drag and a faint taste of its own.

• Full INCI, in descending order: Butyrospermum Parkii (Shea) Butter, Ricinus Communis (Castor) Seed Oil, Theobroma Cacao (Cocoa) Seed Butter, Euphorbia Cerifera (Candelilla) Wax, Tocopherol
• With percentages: Shea Butter 40.0, Castor Seed Oil 30.0, Cocoa Seed Butter 18.0, Candelilla Wax 11.7, Tocopherol 0.3. That is 100.0
• No flavour, no sweetener, no fragrance, no parfum, no essential oil, none of the 26 EU declarable components. There is nothing in it to lick off
• No menthol, no camphor, no phenol, no salicylic acid. None of the cooling or peeling agents that a medicated lip balm uses
• No petrolatum and no mineral oil. Replaced by castor oil at 30 percent, and the paragraph above says what that changes
• No preservative, and here the claim holds: there is no water, so there is no water activity to preserve
• No dyes, no shine agents, no plumping actives, no SPF
• No beeswax and no lanolin, so it suits vegans. The wax is candelilla at 11.7 percent
• Honest trade-off one: it has no SPF. Lips burn, and lip cancers occur mostly on the lower lip. If you are out in the sun, the mineral sunscreen on this shelf is safe on lips and is the right answer, over the top of this
• Honest trade-off two: with no flavour, it tastes faintly of cocoa butter and castor oil. Castor oil in particular has a slightly sticky mouthfeel and a mild taste of its own, and 30 percent of it is not hidden
• Honest trade-off three: the finish is matte, not glossy. That suits anybody, which is the point, and it also means it will look like nothing
• Honest trade-off four: the tube is a push-up cardboard barrel rather than plastic. It cannot be wound back down, so push a little at a time, and it will soften if it gets wet