Its not an addiction in the true medical sense, but yes, you
can train your body to rely on lip balm. Here’s what happens: When your lips
start to feel dry or get flaky, they send signal to a deeper layer of skin to
produce fresh, plump skin cells. But when you put on lip balm, you slow down
the signal because you’re creating a barrier layer that prevents the
evaporation of more moisture, so the basal layer never gets the signal to
produce new cells. When the lip balm wears off, all of a sudden your lips dry
out again and your basal layer has to hurry up and start producing your
lips feel dry, you add more lip
balm, which once again tells the basal layer, hey we don’t need any more skin
cells. And the cycle repeats.
