BALM SQUAD
With fun packaging, enticing flavours and irresistible colours, lip balm now comes in so many varieties, why own just one? Self-professed enthusiast LIZA HERZ reports.
UNLESS YOUR MOTHER ENTERED YOU
in toddler beauty pageants, colourless lip balm is probably the first cosmetic you were permitted to wear. I was 10 when I discovered that a Dr Pepper Lip Smacker could deepen my lip colour if scribbled on hard enough, a memory brought back with vivid clarity when Maybelline New York debuted its similarly tinted Baby Lips balms in 2011. They were such an instant hit that they helped the brand become No. 1 in colour cosmetics in Canada.
Despite grudgingly moving on to more sophisticated lipsticks and stains, my original balm love remained and soon morphed into a compulsion, as I collected everything from Carmex to La Prairie, well past any reasonable need. Psychoanalysts suggest that collecting, or its extreme version, hoarding, is a way for unloved children to self-soothe by obsessively acquiring excess stuff, which makes YouTube haul videos look especially poignant. But my own theory, not yet validated by science, is that lip balm is childhood whimsy in a tube, an anodyne substitute for the paint pots and crayons of preschool.
Landing hard-to-find balms is childishly satisfying, although now the global reach of e-commerce has blunted the thrill of the hunt. A Gwyneth-recommended (don’t hate) German balm, Apricoderm, set me off in a flurry of net sleuthing only to discover it was actually a Swiss brand, which I finally found in a tiny Zürich Pro tip: lip balm is in German.
There’s no single holy grail balm, no Hermès Birkin of the genre. And price doesn’t seem to be a factor (of course, plane tickets are expensive, so there’s that). I love France’s stubby orange-capped Dermophil Mer Montagne because it smells identical to orange Froot Loops, and I needed to have the charmingly retro Vaseline Lip Therapy Rosy Lips, a U.K.-only tin of rose-tinted and -scented petroleum jelly. (The North American version comes in a wee plastic pot lacking the graphic punch and pleasing heft of its British sibling.)
Here in Canada, lip care is big business with $64 million in annual sales (oddly, the exact amount that Canadians spent on probiotic supplements in 2013) as balms have transcended their humble stick origins. Seemingly every beauty brand now includes a balm in their lineups, and ever-newer flavours, colours and clever packaging have sneakily encouraged even casual balm users to amass their own sizable collections.
For me, lip balm shopping is always methodically planned. Well, except for that time I found myself at a CVS after a late night of elderflower cocktails at New York’s Gramercy Park Hotel. The lure of a cavernous American drugstore, more brightly lit than an operating room, was too much and I vaguely recall scooping everything in sight. Question for the universe: Why isn’t Neutrogena lip balm available in Canada? “Lip balm tends to be an impulse purchase,” says Burt’s Bees senior brand manager Carolyn Hungate, so there is an imperative to constantly release new versions. (The economically minded should note that the company’s limited-edition Apple Caramel Moisturizing Lip Balm for fall »