Lip care

In this guide, we'll talk about the specific characteristics of lips, the ingredients to look for in products specially designed for this delicate area, the mistakes not to make, and also recommendations for sticks, balms and masks specially designed for lips. Lips require special care, as their anatomy is totally different from the rest of the face (see other FACIAL CARE).

Moisturizing and nourishing lip stick:

Lip balms

Night balms

It's true that during the day, we're much more active, and using a night balm is a real opportunity to moisturize your lips. If you want to moisturize your lips even more before applying a balm, you can use a lotion or gel with a high humectant content.

If you want to further moisturize your lips before applying a balm, you can use a lotion or gel with a high humectant content.

The original labello contains shea butter, jojoba oil, castor oil and beeswax, but it contains an aroma and BHT, which is why I don't recommend it.

Bioderma's atoderm lip stick contains beeswax and shea butter, but it also contains mineral oil, perfume and BHT, so I wouldn't recommend it either.

Laroche-Posay's nutritic contains ceramides and the classic beeswax, shea butter and castor oil, but there are around thirty ingredients, which seems far too many for me to recommend it.

Anatomy of the lips:

And we start with the anatomy of the lips. The main problem is that the protective barrier of the lips is much thinner than that of the rest of your skin, and your lips dehydrate very quickly, there's virtually no stratum corneum, and the wind, cold and dry air wreak havoc in winter.

The lips have sebaceous glands called Fordyce's glands, but they are not connected to pores, and when these glands become supercial in the lips, they can cause aesthetic discomfort.

Sebaceous glands are present in the lips, but they are not as efficient as for the rest of the face, and are insufficient to retain all the moisture required in winter conditions.

Cosmetic ingredients for lips:

What's special about specific lip care products is that there are certain ingredients that are found all the time, and unfortunately they can cause irritation or allergies. The most common ingredients are castor oil, also known as Castor oil or rissinus Communis, beeswax, propolis and, of course, perfumes.

These ingredients can be found everywhere, and especially in lip sticks, because the manufacturers need to have a perfect melting point, i.e. the stick must be neither too liquid nor too solid.

That's why we often find the same vegetable waxes and oils. After all, these ingredients aren't bad - they're even safe - except that they can irritate your lips, and you simply have to be careful how your lips react when you apply a stick or balm to them. The ingredients to be wary of are questionable chemical sunscreens.

Mineral oil doubt!

As far as mineral oils are concerned, this is a huge debate. I don't have any problem with mineral oils in conventional cosmetics, but it's a different story when it comes to lips, as some of the product can be ingested.

It is possible that poor-quality mineral oils may contain MOSH saturated hydrocarbons and MOAH aromatic hydrocarbons. Their precise risk is not yet well established, but MOAHs are strongly suspected of being carcinogenic and MOSHs of accumulating in the organs.

I'd like to make it clear that just because a product contains mineral oils doesn't mean it will automatically contain MOSH or MOAS. The other thing is that it's important to have an anti-oxidant in the lip stick formula to protect the product, and it's always preferable for the lip stick to contain vitamin E or C rather than BHT or butylated hydroxytoluene, which is an ingredient suspected of being an endocrine disruptor.

For my part, I wouldn't choose a lip stick containing BHT or mineral oils, because you can apply them many times during the day and the risk of absorption is high. But for balms or masks to be used at night, the risk of absorption is lower, so I continue to use products with mineral oils. But that's just my point of view.

Can you become addicted to lip stick?

Now for a question that made the headlines a few years ago: can you get hooked on lip stick? Often, once you get into the habit of using a lip stick, you can't do without it, you love the smell, the texture or it just becomes a habit. In fact, we have the impression that our lips have become addicted to lip sticks, that our lips always need more moisturizing and we can't do without them.

My advice is to start moisturizing your lips early, before they become very dry, and to use lip sticks sparingly - there's no need to apply them 10 times a day. Returning to the subject of dependency, it's possible that your lips will become accustomed to the application of lip stick, because lip hydration is a precarious balance, much more fragile than the skin on the rest of the face.

Another predictable explanation is that your lip stick creates a slight irritation, which can have the effect of encouraging you to use your lip stick more often, creating a vicious circle. All the more reason to be very vigilant about the composition of lip products.

Now let's talk about what not to do:

With the onset of winter, lips tend to become dry, they lose their shine and if nothing is done, chapping and cracking appear. Here are the mistakes not to be made.

The first mistake is to follow the hacks you see on certain social networks, such as exfoliation. Exfoliation is absolutely unnecessary on the lips. As we saw earlier, the anatomy of the lips is completely different from the rest of the facial skin.

And most of the time, exfoliation with an alpha hydroxide acid will simply remove healthy cells, as the stratum corneum on the lips is extremely thin, if not non-existent.

The second mistake is a habit that can be disastrous. It's true that as soon as you feel dry lips, the temptation is to lick your lips, and this habit leads to the appearance of severe dermatitis.

The reason is quite simple: saliva contains digestive enzymes that destroy the lips' protective barrier, which is already in a poor state due to dryness, further aggravating lip dehydration. Add to this winter air and sun exposure, and it's going to be very difficult to get your lips back to normal.

Mistake number 3 not protecting your lips when you're out in the sun, the recommendation is not to use products with dubious chemical sunscreens, because in this specific area allergies to chemical filters are not uncommon as this scientific article published in 2019 shows.

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Fonseca A, Jacob SE, Sindle A. Art of prevention: Practical interventions in lip-licking dermatitis. Int J Womens Dermatol. 2020 Jun 5;6(5):377-380. doi: 10.1016/j.ijwd.2020.06.001. PMID: 33898702; PMCID: PMC8060673.

H. Cheng, J. Konya, E. Lobel, P. Fernandez-Penas

Patch testing for cheilitis: A 10-year series

Dermatitis, 30 (6) (2019), pp. 347-351

Dyall-Smith, 2010, Greenberg et al., 2017, Zhou and Pratt, 2018).