This OG lip balm is a natural beauty win—and you can find it at any drugstore

If you’re anything like me, you grew up stashing Burt’s Bees® Lip Balm in every backpack, purse, and coat pocket so you’d never be caught without it. You’re not wrong for calling me obsessed, but the reason it’s still my go-to lip-saver decades later is a bit more evolved.

Take a trip down memory lane with me and my pal Burt, and allow me to elaborate.

First off, the yellow tubes of Burt’s Bees are just iconic. They’re the cherry Lipsmacker for millennials. It’s the lip balm all your friends had. If you weren’t in on the Burt’s trend, you were missing out—but more importantly (and still relevant to me today), it was crazy moisturizing, period.

I can still remember trying Burt’s Bees for the first time in middle school when my best friend Caitlin offered me a swipe. The tingly sensation of the classic, peppermint-infused Beeswax Lip Balm was unlike anything I had tried before, and immediately I was hooked.

Speaking of peppermint, the original flavor basically acts as a breath mint (not the edible kind, of course). Ate onions for lunch? No problem. The mega-minty balm has you covered (and saved me from many potentially embarrassing conversations in the cafeteria back then, and the office kitchen now). Get you a lip balm that can do both.

Not only was the classic Beeswax Lip Balm a crucial part of my awkward teen years, the Pomegranate variety served as an intro to lipstick. Layering on the berry-tinted balm today still brings me back to borrowing my friend Stephanie’s Pomegranate Lip Balm in Geometry class (and feeling like a million bucks with our slightly rouged pouts). I still swear by a swipe before I head into a meeting for a mid-day pick-me-up.

And that brings me to the ingredients. The peppermint in the original formula accompanies coconut, sunflower seed, canola, castor, and soybean oils—plus rosemary extract, lanolin, tocopherol, limonene, and of course, beeswax.

It’s one of the only products I didn’t have to Marie Kondo during my cosmetic drawer’s natural-beauty overhaul.

Yup, just 11 ingredients make up the super-nourishing formula. Now, as a natural-beauty obsessed adult, it’s one of my only long-term products that I didn’t have to worry about Marie Kondo-ing when I gave my cosmetic drawer an au natural overhaul.

“Formulating with natural ingredients from the start sets Burt’s Bees apart,” says Matt Kopac, sustainable business and innovation manager at Burt’s Bees. “We were natural before natural was cool.”

“We were natural before natural was cool.”

Even better was learning that my forever lip balm sidekick also aligned with my environmental values (because like I said, I’m a millennial, and we love that) with its responsibly sourced ingredients.

“Burt’s Bees [invests in] strong, mutually beneficial partnerships with local communities,” says Shannon Hess, associate director of responsible sourcing. “The beeswax in our lip balms is known as Community Sourced Beeswax and is traceable to our beekeeping partners in Tanzania and Vietnam.”

Plus, not only is all the packaging recyclable, the yellow tubes themselves are made from 50 percent post-consumer plastic. The kicker? Burt’s Bees boasts the classification of a zero-waste company, and hasn’t sent any trash to a landfill since 2010. Legit stuff.

And seriously, you can’t argue with results. The beeswax-powered formula has hardly changed from the original (that Burt and his co-founder Roxanne first sold on a much smaller scale in Maine in 1991) because when you nail something on the first try, you don’t mess with it.

“We structure the balm with beeswax, which forms a barrier against moisture loss,” says Esther Tristani, senior scientist in Burt’s Bees product development. “We top that with antioxidant-rich vitamin E and your favorite flavor for a 100 percent natural solution for your dry lips.”

To preemptively gear up for any cold-weather induced chapped lip disasters, I recently picked up a classic tube on a drugstore run with my mom. (Full disclosure: I also snatched the Pomegranate flavor out of the Superfruit Lip Balm four-pack she bought for herself.) Almost 15 years since my first Burt’s purchase at my local Walmart, it’s lost none of its moisturizing zip, and my jacket pockets are stocked and ready for fall.

In partnership with Burt’s Bees

Photos: Burt’s Bees