Make taking care of your lips your New Year’s resolution with these winter lip care tips!

Lips say a lot about a person. They can be alluring, expressive, soft, or a host of other descriptive terms. That’s why it’s important to keep your lips looking healthy especially during the dry winter months. This can be easily accomplished with a few tips on winter lip care. Knowing a little bit about your lips and how to keep them hydrated are key to keeping them healthy and looking their best.

Let’s start with a few facts about the skin on your lips. Even though your lips are part of your face, they do not contain oil glands like the rest of your facial skin does. This means that they lack natural moisture which is why they need to be moisturized many times throughout the day. The truth is, your lips need more care during the winter months than your face does. Secondly, the skin on your lips is the most driest and thinnest tissue on your body. With those two facts in mind, let’s look at the following five tips to keep your lips hydrated.

Five Tips for Winter Lip Care

1. Use the Best Ingredients: Certain hydrating ingredients are needed to help protect your lips from wintry winds and dry weather. These ingredients, called emollients are easy to find as they’re in many lip balms. Emollients are nourishing to your lips because they help to replace oils in your skin. The more of these emollients in a lip balm product, the better it will be for your lips. Look for any plant oil such as jojoba, olive, coconut, or sunflower oil. Shea butter, aloe vera, beeswax Vitamin E, allantoin, glycerin, and petroleum jelly are also emollients that your lips will appreciate.

2. Look for Humectants: Use products containing humectants which is another group of hydrating ingredients. Humectants will absorb water from the air into your skin and help to keep your lips hydrated. Humectants are oil free ingredients such as urea, glycerin, hyaluronic acid, and propylene glycol. These ingredients are very important for your lips.

3. Avoid Drying Agents: There are also certain ingredients to avoid when choosing a nourishing lip balm. You don’t want to purchase any product that is going to dry your lips and may create problems such as chapped or inflamed lips. Say goodbye to products that have any type of alcohol, corn starch, or other drying agent. Check your lipstick and make sure it doesn’t contain a drying agent. If it does, switch to a lip gloss or at least use a nourishing lip balm under your lipstick whenever you apply it.

4. Exfoliate: One of the best ways to help keep your lips healthy is to exfoliate them. Just as you exfoliate your facial skin in the shower, gently rub the same product over your lips. You can also use a soft toothbrush topped with an exfoliant to remove the dry skin on your lips. Exfoliating your lips once or twice a week will get rid of unwanted dry skin and promote healthier skin to grow. It will keep your lips looking radiant and supple. Products containing papaya are excellent for exfoliating. Papaya contains natural exfoliating enzymes to help get rid of dry skin and to soften healthy tissue. After exfoliating your lips, be sure to finish with a nourishing lip balm.

5. Moisturize at Night:  Moisturize your lips at night by using a lip balm. At nighttime, outside temperatures drop and indoor temperatures rise which creates hot dry air in your home. While you’re sleeping, your lips are affected by this and need to be moisturized. By using a quality nourishing lip balm before going to bed, you’re lips will be moisturized and it will help prevent cracking due to dry skin.

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About the Author: Carleen Coulter

Laura Geller Lip Strip Cooling Sugar Scrub is a really nice lip scrub that tends to get high user ratings. With peppermint and spearmint oils, the formula is minty with sugar used for the scrub. I found it to be a good gentle scrub that was also tasty!

To use this, apply it to your lips and lightly rub. Wipe off the excess and apply your favorite color or balm.  Why scrub? It helps keep your lips soft and smooth, providing a better base for lipstick or gloss, and helping treatments from balms and conditioners absorb better.

Today brings just a quickie lip tip for you. Do you need a lip scrub and don’t want to pay for a fancy pot scrub or balm?  Simply get out a bit of brown sugar and mix it with a little olive oil. Rub in on your lips for a moisturizing scrub!

Another option is to use dry powdered strawberry jello (the kind with sugar, don’t get sugar free) for a bit of a scrub that will leave a tint behind.

Did you know that Kenzo, known for their perfumes, also does skin care? Well, they do, using the name Kenzoki, and here is a product that I already know will be on my best products of the year list. I can’t rave about it enough!

The Kenzoki Sweet and Smooth Lip Duo is a dual sided lipstick shaped balm. On one half, the balm contains sugar grains and lemon fibers as a natural exfoliator. The other half is a conditioning balm with Vitamin E. The exfoliating side is very gentle—you hardly feel it working, yet it does a decent job. The conditioning side is smooth and packed full of moisture. It has a nice balance between conditioners and thickness. Basically, it isn’t waxy, but it is thick enough that it feels like it says a bit. It reminds me quite a bit of another favorite of mine, the Caudalie lip conditioner (read review).

The balm leaves a sweet, sort of almond taste behind that I also love.

$22, and seriously worth that price in my mind, at KenzoUSA.com.

Lips can benefit from a scrub just like the rest of your skin. One gentle way to go about it is with something like the Garden Botanika Lip Scrub.

This moisturizing scrub contains avocado oil and jojoba seed powder. The scrubbing action from it is slight, which is really all the lips need, and boy does it packs moisture! I love the feel of this one, but I have to admit that I would like a bit more scrubbing action, simply because I am one of those who would over do it with scrubs if I let myself.

Garden Botanika recommends that it be followed with their Vitamin E Stick, which I also happily recommend. If you haven’t tried a vitamin E stick before, you should! They are great general conditioners.

Garden Botanika is available at ULTA Beauty, or you can comparison shop for Garden Botanika at Shopzilla.

This is a great little kit! The Peter Thomas Roth Lips To Die For, Lip Facial Trio contains all that you need to give yourself a lip spa treatment.

For the lip product addict who has everything, this would be a unique an intereting gift.

The kit comes with three products:

• Heavenly Lemon Sugar Scrub to provide exfoliation and prepare the lips for the next steps.
• Super Smooth Lip Putty as a moisturizing mask for the lips.
• Pink Bombshell Lip Balm conditions the lips, further moisturizes and protects.

Great for yourself or as a unique gift for a lip product lover.

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Now here is an interesting concept! The Bourjois Duo Lip Scrub and Balm has a mini buffer in the cap to exfoliate your lips. The balm itself moisturizes with glycerin emollients.

There is only one shade, which is a sheer “pearly veil.” So this will impart some sheen. I prefer glosses such as that over a lipstick shade, although they can also be nice when you want a more natural look, but don’t want your lips to look naked either.  

The Bourjois Duo is priced at $17, which is mid-range for a gloss. I might have to give this a try!

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