Balm Bomb

I am swamped this week, but I want to use some of my limited mental energy to post on my blog instead of for "more important" things, and I'm a grownup, so no one can stop me. Still, this is going to be very short (by my standards).

I bought this lip balm out of desperation over the weekend, when I realized I was going to be away from the house for 5 hours without any. The horror! The drugstore around the corner from my in-laws' house was tiny and only had a small selection. There was Nivea, which for me usually ranges from ineffective to making my lips worse, Burt's Bees, which has the same problems (and was priced at $7 a tube), and Lip Smackers, which I haven't used in a decade. And Vaseline. In retrospect, I probably should have gone for the Lip Smackers, but instead I grabbed this pot of Vaseline Rosy Lips.

The gamble here was that lip products that are made up entirely of petrolatum (and fragrance) like this one don't usually do much to moisturize my lips. Protect, sure, but not moisturize. So I don't know why I picked this stuff instead of one of the Vaseline options that also had cocoa butter or whatever in it. Okay, I kind of do: I was imagining it as a replacement for my Smith's Rosebud Salve, which is almost empty. Usually I really like rosy fragrances in lip balms, like Smith's (on my Instagram) or TokyoMilk (on my Instagram) or even L'Oreal lipstick (reviewed here).

Unfortunately, not only does this stuff not really do much for my lips, I also don't like the smell. It smells almost exactly like some Maybelline lip products, like the Vivid Matte Liquid (reviewed here). I find the fragrance unpleasant, but the taste is the worst part. It's really strong and distracting, and I end up tasting even more of a balm than a lip color that I consciously avoid rubbing off of my lips. So I guess that scent that I couldn't identify in the Maybelline stuff was supposed to be rose.

I don't know what I'm going to do with this stuff. Maybe I'll use it as a cuticle balm. And never forget my lip balm at home again!