Dry skin and the best lotion ever made

But not for your lips

Even though it’s been a mild winter near Chicago, we’re still in prime dry skin season. Lizard hands are everywhere, and when you shake hands you’re not only risking the passage of some gross germs – which seems to have slowed down everyone in America at some point in the past couple of months, except me (knock on wood) – but also having some skin scrubbed away by someone else’s sandpaper hands.

This newsletter has no sponsor, but if Eucerin lotion ever wants to sponsor it, I’d plaster their name all over every post. They don’t even need to give me money. I’d do it just for a few free bottles of Eucerin Intensive Repair lotion. I love that stuff so much that my kids gave me a bottle for Christmas. I’ve got three bottles in my bedroom, all close to empty, but not quite. I can’t bring myself to dispose of them when there’s even a drop of that magical substance within.

My hands get so dry in the winter and have for years. There are few things worse than dry hands that crack and bleed. Once that happens, you’re screwed. You might as well just not try to touch anything until April. I tried every lotion or dry skin preventer ever invented. I hated most of them. Either they didn’t work, or they left my hands feeling like I’d just massaged a stick of butter. (Massaging a stick of butter isn’t weird, right?)

But then I tried Eucerin Intensive Repair and it seemed like it had been formulated specifically for my hands. I put it on first thing in the morning and last thing before I go to sleep and I’m good to go all winter long. No gross residue. No bad smell. And it works.

Okay, I realize that all of that sounded like the script for a Eucerin commercial, but I can’t help it if that lotion changed my life! I have almost zero brand loyalty to anything, but they’ll have to take my Eucerin Intensive Repair lotion from my cold, dead, but soft and smooth, hands.

I feel the way about Eucerin Intensive Repair that some people feel about chapstick. (Also, I know that Chapstick is a name brand, and there are non-Chapstick brand chapsticks, but what’s the other word for it? Lip balm? I don’t like that. It’s chapstick. Little c.)

I’m not a chapstick user. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever used chapstick. And I think that’s the only way to avoid becoming a regular chapstick user. Anyone who uses chapstick even one time has to use it for the rest of their life. I don’t know why that is, but it appears to be an absolute truth of the universe. No one has ever said, “I used to use chapstick all the time, but then I quit.” Impossible.

My (rock solid) theory is that there is something in chapstick that is either addictive so you can’t wait to get more of it on your lips, or dries out your lips more quickly so you have to apply more chapstick to take care of your dry lips. It’s like a bar that gives you free pretzels to make you thirsty so you’ll have to order more drinks. Except the chapstick is the pretzel and the drink all smashed together and placed into a convenient little tube.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Big Chapstick – the industry, not necessarily just Chapstick the brand – has conspired to make your lips need chapstick. You’re just an unwitting pawn in the chapstick wars.

And you thought Burt’s Bees seemed so harmless.

Speaking of conspiracies, why do we have a separate moisturizer for lips and skin? We can combine shampoo, conditioner, and body wash into one bottle, but we can’t conquer a combination skin moisturizer and lip moisturizer? For all the magical powers of Eucerin Intensive Repair, it just doesn’t taste very good. Can’t they develop a blueberry peppercorn flavor or something? Okay, maybe not blueberry peppercorn, but you know what I mean.

Also, my dear chapstick users, do any of you ever use the entire chapstick? I can think of almost no more impressive feat of responsibility than keeping track of your chapstick long enough to use the entire tube. On the list of things sacrificed to the dryer gods, tubes of chapstick seem second only to socks, and that’s because we have many more socks than chapsticks. (Probably.)

And that’s another great argument for the skin/lip moisturizer combo: not once have I ever put a bottle of Eucerin Intensive Repair through the dryer.