Paying lip service to a greasy problem

As soon as the temperature dips below 70 degrees, my mouth begins to take on the texture of the Dead Sea Scrolls. From that day on, every minute becomes a battle against nature to keep my lips from cracking off. A truly annoying but not generally life-threatening condition, chapped lips require an arsenal of remedies, each less effective than the last. Like an army of Roberto Benigni impersonators commanded by Jimmy Carter, these incompetent soldiers do little more than make a mess while causing a bigger problem.

It seems that the giant moisturizing cartels have a vested interest in hooking you on their product without solving your problem. These lip-remedy-hawking, international mega-corporations have decided that they make more money if you repeatedly buy their mostly useless two-dollar products.

Because of that, they have devoted untold resources-probably money diverted from developing more powerful-sounding names for pimple creams that at best don't cause breakouts-into repackaging the same tube of wax. Though your average pharmacy sells nearly 50 different chapped lip remedies, they all fall into one of two categories.

The first type, variations on basic Chap Stick, amount to little more than a candle in a tube. This supposed remedy comes in various flavors with a variety of different additives. Sometimes it has vitamin E, occasionally it's aloe vera, and every now and then, they even throw in cocoa butter. Luckily, your choice is easy, because except for the packaging and perhaps the flavor, all of these products are exactly the same. These sticks do coat your lips, which protects them from windburn or perhaps keeps them from rusting, but other than that, you're just throwing money away. The second and mildly more successful type of product comes with a heavy price. These petroleum jelly-based tubes of goo may not reverse the problem, but they do keep chapped lips from being painful. In exchange for not feeling pain, users of this method get to live in a world covered by a thin sheen of grease.

From pillows to coffee mugs, shirt sleeves to computer keyboard, my entire world gets fouled with the oily sheen left by this stuff. This happens because no company has yet created a viable delivery method for petroleum-based lip cures.

The only recent innovation in the field-the angled tip-does little more than schmear the goo in a slightly different pattern than did the traditional rounded variety. Actually coating your lips with the product requires the use of a finger, which leads to the aforementioned greasy existence. Worse than the products sold in your local drugstore are the goofy home-style cures that every person offers. From "Coat your lips in olive oil" to "Try sleeping with a humidifier," or the not-recommended combination tactic of sleeping with a humidifier full of olive oil, nothing helps. The closest I've come to an actual cure came from the assumption that if a product moisturizes one part of your body, it might have the same power in other places. This has led me to slathering my fiancée's Oil of Olay on my lips.

While this hasn't quite cured me, it has produced a marked improvement. Assuming there's nothing toxic involved in this particular moisturizer and that nothing bad happens when you ingest it, I might be on the verge of a medical breakthrough.