DHC Lip Cream can cure the common cold.

Ok, not really. But it will absolutely cure something almost as annoying: chronically chapped lips! To give you some background, I am one of those people with perennially chapped lips. It’s been this way for years – since I moved to Texas, actually – and by this point, I’ve grown used to the fact that at any given time, I can peel dying skin off my lips and wince while the new skin still grows in. I have tried pretty much every remedy over the years: Vaseline and Aquafor, drugstore lip balms and their department store equivalents, vitamins, drinking 8 cups of water a day, seeing a dermatologist, etc. If there’s a way to fix it, I have tried it, to no avail. However, pretty much by accident, I have found my holy grail product for lips – the one lip balm that actually cures my chapped lips and allows me to smile without fear horribly traumatizing my coworkers: DHC Lip Cream.

I picked it up during my spring order from DHC, when my lips were so chapped and irritated that my lower vermilion border was red and swollen. Hell, I was buying a scalp massage pack, why not buy a product for my lips, which irritate me way more than my sporadically dry scalp? I was on the verge of going out to Target and picking up some nipple cream, for chrissake! As it happens, DHC has two different lip creams, a Vitamin C stick and their basic lip cream – so I bought the Lip Cream, a little bit because it was literally a third of the price of the other stick, but mostly because of the ingredient listing:

* lanolin oil

* caprylic/capric triglyceride

* euphorbia cerifera (candelilla) wax/candelilla cera/cire de candelilla

* lanolin

* beeswax/cera alba/cire d’abeille

* stearic acid

* olea europaea (olive) fruit oil

* squalane

* pentylene glycol

* panax ginseng root extract

* aloe barbadensis leaf extract

* tocopherol

* phenoxyethanol

* stearyl glycyrrhetinate

See that first ingredient? That’s the main ingredient in nipple cream, and frankly, I’d rather try it in stick form rather than a thick paste inside a tube that says NIPPLE CREAM. Lanolin is a wool-processing byproduct – it’s a wax secreted by the sebaceous glands of sheep to condition their wool, much like how our own hair is moisturized by oil glands in the skin. Apparently, it’s awesome for human skin as well – it’s used in a lot of skincare stuff. So in the spirit of trying anything once, I bought it. And boy, I’m glad I did so!

The Lip Cream comes in an plain apricot colored screw-twist tube. It’s actually deceptively sturdy – although the outside is plastic, the inside is metal, and the whole thing can take a beating. The lip cream is a not-very-promising yellow color. I mean, on the range of “medicinal” to “decorative” most cosmetic products occupy, this is very firmly on the medicinal/therapeutic side. The actual texture is firm and slippery; It applies very easily, and each lip only requires one swipe of cream to be covered. The lip cream doesn’t really taste of anything in particular. However, it does smell a little like wool. Basically, it’s rather like putting Vaseline on your lips.

Honestly…I wasn’t too impressed at first. I mean, it’s just not much to look at, or to feel. The Lip Cream is not absorbed into your lips, it just sits on top of them as far as I can feel. That’s not bad – it certainly cuts down on re-application – but if that was all this was going to do, I was pretty bored. Fortunately, within about a week, the DHC Lip Cream proved me wrong. That’s because, at the end of that first week, my lips had basically healed. When I say healed, I mean the swollen vermillion had receded, my fissures had closed and not reopened, and my daily lip peeling ritual had come to an end. After a further two weeks of use, I could begin wearing lipstick and lipgloss again. It’s been several months, and the only other time my chapped lips returned was during a 10-day period when I lost one tube of lip cream prematurely and had to wait for the next to come by mail. Unfortunately, I don’t have any before/after pictures of my lips, so you’re going to have to take my word on it. I was too downtrodden to take a picture of how horrible I looked before, and I’m not willing to stop using this lip cream for the amount of time necessary for my lips to dry out again – it was bad enough during that ten day gap!

In short, this is my desert island product. The first tube came with me wherever I went, transferred from work purse to casual purse to nightstand to travel bag. By now, nearing the end of tube number three, I just leave it in my night stand and only apply a thick coat at night, right before I go to sleep. I’ve heard some people have adverse reactions to lanolin, but I am not one of them – the skin around my lips was utterly non-reactive to any smearing. There is only one shortcoming to this products, and that is the small size – I went through my first tube in 6 weeks, since each lip cream is only 1.5 grams of product. On the other hand, my second and third tubes have lasted a bit longer as I don’t need to use them as much, my lips having healed up.

Basically, if you have chronically chapped lips, this lip cream is a winner! The Lip Cream is sold on DHC’s US website for $8 per tube; you can also get a two-pack on Amazon for $14.50.