Lip Balm Junkie

I'm the kind of guy that enjoys having moist lips. Before you get the wrong idea what I mean is I hate when my lips are dried out. I not talking about being a little chapped, I mean really dried out. The kind of dry that leaves the small dead strands of skin on your upper lip. The kind that you always pull off like you do to the small strings of white that are left attached to an orange just after you finish peeling it. You slowly pull off these small stands of dead lip one by one until you pull one that is attached just barely to well. And after you force yourself to pull it off a small drop of blood forms on your upper lip. And it hurts. It's quite the image isn't it. The kind of mental picture that leave you cringing. When your lips are that dry every smile shoots tingling pain through your face and leaves you with that same cringe. That's the kind of dry lips I hate.

When I was younger, probably age 9-12 ish, I had the worst dry lips in the world. They were always horrible. My lips were well past the small strands of dead lip skin. They were practically facial lip scab cancer bad. Imagine Viggo Mortensen's lips in the movie Hidalgo. Now imagine it worse and on my 11-year-old face. Because my lips were so dry I would lick them and they would just dry out and get worse and worse. It was a very self destructive behavior.

Then one day something changed and I don't know why but I stop with the licking and stated with the chapstick. (Of course I should say lip balm seeing as how Chapstick is a brand but you all know what I mean.) My first try at lip replenishment treatment was with Carmex. Do you have any idea how badly Carmex stings when applied to lips as bad as mine. That still holds true today. If you go a week or so without using any chapstick and then you take a swipe of Carmex it will burn every first time.

I went through a huge phase where I would only use Carmex but after a few years I started trying other brands to see what I liked. At the time I kept reverting back to Carmex however, it seemed to be the best. All of my friends accused me of being addicted to Carmex but I thought that was rediculous and to prove them wrong I kept trying other brands

Anyway, fast forward to now. Right now my favorite is Burt's Bees. It keeps my lips nice and moist and it never stings upon application. I also really like the minty scent it has.

The reason I tell you about this is because of an experience I had just this week. I had recently worked my way down to the bottom of another tube of Burt's Bees lip balm and was indesperate need of some more. I told Megan and we decided to grab some while we were out buying groceries Monday night. We went and bought our groceries, checked out and had somehow managed to leave without buying any lip balm. It's ok we said. We need to go to another store and buy me some new socks anyway and we'll just pick some up while we're there.

As we drove to the other store I was highly anticipating buying and applying some Burt's Bees. The closer we got the store and the closer we were to getting lip balm I began to notice that my lips were becoming more and more chapped. I thought about this for a while and commented to Megan about it. I made an analogy of my lips to food. I said, "You know how when you're getting ready to eat and your start salivating before you even have any food. I can feel my lips drying out in anticipation of getting new chapstick." All she had to say about that was, "You're addicted."

My name is Shaun Mayo and I'm a lip balmaholic.