Olehenriksen Pout Preserve Peptide Lip Treatment in "Strawberry Sorbet"
Also: January, the lost month
In January, I decided to treat myself to some goodies from Sephora, and this strawberry lip treatment from Olehenriksen was the winner. The loser: a nauseatingly sweet shower oil from Sol de Janeiro. We can talk about that another time.
Although it’s true that the last thing I need is another lip balm, it turns out that this one is great. I had to go to great lengths to procure it. It wasn’t in stock in two local Sephora stores, so I ended up ordering it online and having it sent to me. Ordering a single lip product for delivery feels very wasteful, and I won’t deny that it is. And yet…I really like it. It’s a clear, gooey, strawberry-scented product in a squeezy tube. I find it to be too sticky to wear on its own, so I like to layer it over a different lip balm. The one I've been using is from a brand called Soothing Touch, and I buy their lip balm from Wheatsville. I particularly love the combination of Strawberry Sorbet with Lemon Cardamom—truly a dreamy tart fruity combination. While the Olehenriksen lip treatment is quite sticky on its own, it glides like silk over the Soothing Touch lip balm. I layer them together at night, a trick I use a lot with lip products. I’ll use a lighter balm first and then a heavier, waxier, or stickier product on top to “seal in” the moisture and skin care of the first balm. Lanolips is another good choice as a second layer, especially to heal dry, cracked lips.
January has been one hell of a month, you guys. Even setting aside the madness that is American politics, my own personal January has been relentlessly demanding. We survived Christmas after juggling all the planning/communicating/gift-buying/gift-wrapping/celebrating and got Sammy back to school in early January. Then we had Christmas Part 2 with Paul’s sister, who wasn’t able to be here in December for Christmas. Three days after that, we caravanned down to the south Texas shore for a memorial for a family member who passed away in December. The next day, I had an unexpected bum foot—who gets a bum foot from riding in a car all day?! Along with my bum foot, I caught a cold. Two days later, Sammy came home early from school, sick with what turned out to be the flu. His sickness landed him the ER the next day after a scary but transient episode that looked an awful lot like a seizure. (He’s fine now, but it was a long, frightening evening for our family.) The day after that, I came down with my own nasty version of the flu—or all the stress from the night before exacerbated the illness I had been nursing for several days. In any case, I was basically wiped out for two days and then began a very, very slow recovery. The following weekend, Paul traveled for work, and I solo-parented for four days. During all of this madness, I was trying to keep up with my day job along with all the usual caregiving and chores that I do around here. Between the sheer level of busy-ness and being sick in January, I didn’t work out for two weeks, which is something I never do. This time, I didn’t even have a choice, as my recovery from illness was so slow that I really had no option but to take it very, very easy, even after the worst of the flu was done.
Today I finally hit the trail again, doing a 30-minute walk with some 15-second bursts of running. While I was doing my walk—my first real aerobic exercise in several weeks—I was struck by the absolute relentlessness of midlife, the way one challenge seems to dovetail with the next and you feel like you’re just going from one crisis to the next with no regular life in between. I realized that during these challenges, the only way to make progress on our own personal goals is to be even more relentless than whatever life is throwing at us. Out on my walk, I wondered do I even want to do this any more? “This” meaning my exercise routine, my commitment to myself and goals that matter to no one outside of me. Right now, my honest answer is that I don’t know. But I’m not going to give up just because starting over feels hard.
The only way to be more relentless than life itself is to start over, again and again, as many times as you need to until you find your groove again. In work, in parenting, in play, we start over because it’s the only real choice we have. Start over because you’ve been given another day.
Product Details: Olehenriksen Pout Preserve Peptide Lip Treatment
Sold: at Sephora or on the Olehenriksen website
Flavor Featured Here: Strawberry Sorbet
Price: $22.00