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12 WHAT’S TRENDING
PUCKER UP:
KEEPING WINTER LIPS POUT-WORTHY
Winter’s cold, blustery air can leave not only your skin feeling dry, but also your lips, which can become flaky and cracked. The importance
of keeping lips soft, plump and pouty goes beyond the aesthetics of Instagram, as this can help prevent more sinister lip skin conditions such as dermatitis and infections.
JBy Margaret Mielczarek.
ust like other areas of the skin, the lips have an oil seal that may not work quite as well in winter, says Brisbane consultant dermatologist
Dr Leona Yip, with the typically dry air of this season causing moisture to “evaporate” from the lips, which can leave them “scaly and flaky”.
Combine this with inconsistent use of appropriate lip moisturisers and you have a “vicious cycle”, she adds.
“Lots of people don’t use lip moisturisers or can’t find ones that are greasy enough to lock the moisture
in and repair the skin seal, and so it becomes worse,” Dr Yip said. “And what
becomes a vicious cycle is [that] people start licking their lips, because they think it helps to moisturise their lips.”
Licking lips isn’t a great idea, she says, because “saliva itself is alkaline and it’s irritating, so it actually aggravates the lip dryness”.
While it’s easy to forget about your lips, it’s important to look after them and to keep them moisturised, because if left to dry out, Dr Yip says, “you can develop lip dermatitis that can also become secondarily infected”.
“Sometimes you can get a little bit of food that [stays] in the corner of your mouth [and] you can get a little bit of
RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • JUL 2020