It's not habit. It's the ingredients.
I used to joke that my friend Grai was addicted to chapstick.
She couldn't leave the house without it. Every bag, every jacket pocket, little tubes tucked everywhere. And for years, I just figured that was her thing, you know, some people need it more than others, same as how some people can't leave the house without gum. I thought it was habit, maybe a little oral fixation, and I genuinely never thought much more about it.
Then I started a skincare brand with her and learned things I cannot unknow.
Grai is the co-founder of Oceanic Organics, and she has spent years making her own lip balm specifically because she couldn't find one she trusted. The reason she had to make her own is the same reason so many of us can't put down the tube: mainstream lip balms are formulated to keep you coming back, and it has nothing to do with your willpower or how dry your lips actually are.
There are ingredients in standard chapsticks that create chemical dependency. Grai compared it to MSG in food, and it clicked for me immediately. MSG makes food taste better AND makes you want more of it, and some of the same logic applies here. You put on the chapstick, your lips feel better for a minute, and then they feel drier than before, so you reach for it again, and now you need to buy another tube by Friday. That is not a coincidence.
Most of us thought we were doing the smart thing when we switched from the cherry Chapstick brand to Burt's Bees. The little bee on the label, the beeswax listed in the ingredients, it felt natural. Then a lawsuit came out documenting carcinogens and forever chemicals found in those same chapsticks, and Grai described her reaction the best way I've ever heard it: "Forever just sounds like a long time when we're talking about chemicals."
So, she went and made her own. Not because she was able to just stop using lip balm, she still can't leave the house without it, but because she needed an alternative she could actually trust.
I have the ingredient list sitting in front of me right now. Organic beeswax, organic cocoa butter, organic avocado oil, vitamin E oil, lanolin, organic rosemary oil, organic peppermint oil. That is the whole list. The cocoa butter makes it smell like something warm and familiar without any added fragrance. The avocado oil and vitamin E go deeper into the lip to actually repair, not just coat and dry out. Lanolin, which is made from sheep's wool, gives it its consistency. And the peppermint is subtle, not the kind that makes your whole face feel like it's on fire.
She put it on at 9:30am the morning we recorded. By 3pm she had not reapplied. For someone who used to need it constantly, that's what a well-formulated product looks like in practice.
I have been using these lip balms for months now and I can tell you that the "I can't leave without my chapstick" feeling is gone for me too. My lips stay hydrated, which is what they were supposed to do in the first place, and I am not running through a tube every week because I'm not fighting against whatever was in the old one.
I'm also pregnant right now and one of the quieter gifts of this whole Oceanic Organics chapter has been not having to audit my skincare routine. So many things had to change when I found out, things I was eating, things I was using, and this was one place where I didn't have to think twice. Grai said something on our podcast episode together that I keep thinking about: if you can use it while you're pregnant or nursing, should you have been using the other stuff at all?
I don't have a perfect answer to that, but I think about it every time I'm at Target and I see the wall of lip balms and I know what's in them now.
The Oceanic Organics shop is at https://oceanicorganics.co and if you've been a chapstick-in-every-pocket person your whole life, the everyday lip balm is where I'd start.
Olivia
P.S. We just dropped a full podcast episode where Grai walks through every ingredient in both the lip balm and the beef tallow moisturizer, why she chose each one and what it actually does for your skin. If you want to go deeper, that episode is a good listen and I'll link it https://open.spotify.com/episode/6eUguSLfoJZLc3xNCSfNHO?si=44333f4df0ac451e
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/she-couldnt-find-a-safe-lip-balm-so-she-made-one/id1769526032?i=1000772156715