"Dude, your lips are really chapped," my younger brother said to me a little more than a week ago, his voice a mix of disgust and concern. If he can be counted on for anything, it's his brutally honest, unfiltered, and sometimes unnecessary commentary.
I was immediately embarrassed. But more than that, I was frustrated because I had just slathered on lip balm and sealed it in with a coat of Vaseline. It didn’t work. Nothing ever worked.
Eight years ago, when I was a burgeoning beauty editor, I tasked myself with the impossible—and now in hindsight, stupid—mission to test all the new lipsticks, stains, and glosses I had received for that month. In one sitting. I swiped one on, and then wiped it off. Swiped another, and wiped it off. There must have been at least 20. And by the end I had peeled an entire layer of skin off my lips. They were swollen, red, and just really, really angry. I attempted to soothe them with lip balm and then waited with the hope—oh, the naïveté!— that they would quickly calm down.
The next day the swelling had subsided somewhat, but in its place was a hardened, chapped mess that itched and burned at the touch of anything. My toothpaste made them hurt. So did water. I soon discovered smiling was out of the question; anything larger than a slight smirk led to them cracking and then bleeding. Crying for help, I turned to my roommate who swore by A&D, the diaper rash ointment, for healing cuts and softening dry skin. Desperate, I took her tube (I bought her a new one) and carried it with me everywhere, surreptitiously applying (because, diaper rash ointment) a layer before any activity that involved my mouth. My then boyfriend, now husband, will forever associate kissing me with A&D, which is both very weird and very unfortunate.
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I didn’t realize what I had done was given myself lip dermatitis or a form of eczema called eczematous cheilitis. A&D helped rescue my lips, but they were never quite the same after that—they’ve been chronically chapped since. I quietly dealt with it by having a mini vessel of Vaseline with me at all times, avoiding irritants (I couldn’t eat spicy food, my favorite, for years), and all other lip products.
I slowly began trying new balms and formulas again, cautiously, one by one. But it wasn’t until after my brother's comment, when I tried Tatcha’s Kissu Lip Mask—the first product that wasn’t (1) designed for a baby’s butt and (2) formulated with petroleum jelly—that my lips didn’t completely rebel against.
What convinced me to try it was when Victoria Tsai, Tatcha's founder, told me that she'd once also given herself dermatitis from experimenting with beauty products, which ultimately led to the creation of her clean beauty brand. The Kissu lip mask was born in much the same way as all of Tatcha’s offerings: It's free of parabens, synthetic fragrances, sulfates, and phthalates. But what really makes it interesting is its texture: It goes on like a jelly, but it melts into a nonsticky liquid sheet mask. (The formula, I'm told, took a team of scientists more than a year to perfect.)
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The mask looks like light pink Jell-O, and it’s contained in the cutest little tub that comes with a tiny gold spatula, which makes the whole experience feel like you’re a fancy giant scooping out dessert.
It’s meant to be used as an overnight treatment, so I applied it at night right before bed. And in the morning, when I saw that it didn’t make my lips worse, I patted on some more. And a few more times in the afternoon. Three days later, after regular use, my lips—for the first time in eight years—were chap-, scale-, and itch-free. This must be what a normal human with functioning lips feels like, I marveled. This must be what my husband, who never uses chapstick or balm or any type of lip salve and never has had to suffer the agony of having chapped lips in his life, feels like.
So why does it work so well? “It’s a combination of the active ingredients and the form,” Tsai explains. “The jelly formula absorbs more easily than waxes, delivering active ingredients like Japanese peach seed extract, three Japanese rose extracts, and Japanese camellia oil, which nourish, repair, and protect the lips.”
And with that, my eight-year-long lip saga has come to an end. So suck on that, little brother.
Tatcha The Kissu Lip Mask, $30, tatcha.com
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