Hey everyone! I’ve been working on my 2022 Goals and one of them was to start a monthly health and fitness post on here! So, I am starting it today! I asked my friend Lauren from Mom Home Guide for help on a name for this monthly series and she suggested Get Fit with Carrie! I have SO many health and fitness topics I want to share with you all this year! It is one of my favorite hobbies and I want to help ALL of my readers to become healthier and fitter this year!
So, this first health topic may seem like an odd one for some of you… but, the rest of you will be nodding your head in agreement that you have run into this issue at some point in your life or you’re currently going through it. Another one of my 2022 Goals was to break my addiction to chapstick. Some people responded on my post and said they had never heard of it! But, trust me… it is a real thing (just do a Google search on it!). What first put the idea in my head that I possibly was a little TOO much in love with chapstick was when one of the bigger blogger’s I follow on Instagram posted on her Instagram Stories that she had a chapstick addiction and was asking for advice on how to ‘quit it’. She shared all of the responses to her question and I was AMAZED at how many others had the same problem! It made me start to think about my own chapstick routine and when I started to ACTUALLY think about how often I was applying the stuff, I was floored! I TOO had a chapstick addiction!
How Do you Know You Have a Chapstick Addiction?
- You have stashes of chapstick (and I’d say lip gloss counts, too!) EVERYWHERE. Your bag, your car, on the couch where you sit, in the bathroom, by your nightstand, etc. You can see in the photo above just how many tubes of chapstick I had stashed EVERYWHERE!
- You use it not only in the winter compusively, but in ALL seasons! Even the summer!
- Your husband, friends or kids make a comment about how often you use it.
- You’re applying it constantly… as soon as your lips don’t feel a little chapstick on them… YOU MUST apply more.
- If you forgot your chapstick and you’re out and about for a few hours or the entire day, your lips feel completely naked. You MUST FIND chapstick.
- You wonder how your husband, kids, etc. never need chapstick and their lips look just fine without it!
How Did I Break My Chapstick Addiction?
I was amazed at how quickly I broke my Chapstick Addiction. It took me only 2 weeks and 4 weeks until my lips felt ‘normal’ without anything on them! I pretty much went COLD turkey! I started out by just putting coconut oil on my lips in the morning when I first woke up and at night before bed. My lips felt really, really naked without anything on them throughout the rest of the day. I thought about my lips a lot and how they felt the first two weeks. It was weird… but, I stuck to it!
Another tip for the first 2 weeks is to find an exfoliator/scrub for your lips (I LOVE THESE by LUSH!).
Chapstick prevents your lips from exfoliating properly when you stop using it. You’ll have A LOT of dead skin to get rid of. This results in a really yucky set of lips for a while that are constantly feeling the need to shed. I needed to exfoliate my lips more than ever the first 2 weeks. After that, not so much.
By week 3 I felt that I could let myself have a ‘Chapstick Routine’ throughout the day. I felt I could handle it by then. I started to let myself have any of my chapsticks once in the morning after breakfast, after lunch, after dinner and before bed. Chapstick ONLY 4 times a day. I let myself pick any chapstick I wanted to use from my old collection and then at night I would apply a thick layer of the ‘cult favorite’ LANEIGE Lip Sleeping Mask. My lips felt AH-mazing! Once the chapstick would wear off throughout the day, my lips didn’t feel naked. They didn’t feel dry. I stopped thinking about them when they didn’t have a touch of chapstick on them. They felt healthy when bare! I asked myself, WHY didn’t I do this sooner?
Additional Tips on How to Break the Chapstick Habit
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When you apply chapstick repetitively, it creates a cycle where your lips are dry, so you apply more chapstick, which only creates temporary relief before it leaves them dryer.
- Did you know that SOME chapsticks will actually dry your lips out more? I read that some of the dyes and/or perfumes in chapsticks can actually give you the opposite of what you want… DRYER lips! Good for the chapstick company, but bad for you!
- The ingredient menthol may feel good when you put it on (gives you all the tingly lip feels!), but this ingredient causes irritation and literally removes the outer layers of the skin. Phenol and Salicylic acid will give you the same issues as menthol. These are ingredients to avoid!
- A lot of the most common ingredients (learn more by clicking HERE!) found in lip balm not only can affect our hormones, irritate our skin and in extreme cases cause cancer (even BREAST cancer)! This is why I may make the switch to using plain coconut oil on my lips in the NEAR future and nothing else.
- Coconut oil’s moisturizing effects are wonderful for chapped lips! Other benefits include the potential disinfecting and antimicrobial effects of coconut oil, which leave your lips germ-free, and subsequently help protect any cracked skin from becoming infected.
- Surprisingly, for some… the toothpaste you’re using can give you chapped lips!
- Drink UP! Staying hydrated will help keep your lips moist!
- Avoid licking your lips, this only dries out your lips more. (Easier said than done!)
So, that is what I wanted to share with you today. I hope I help someone! At first, I thought there was NO WAY I’d ever break the habit, but honestly… it wasn’t as bad as I thought it’d be. And, I feel better about my healthy lips… healthier WITHOUT chapstick! Who would have ever thought that was possible? Well, it IS!
