My Excessive Collections: new lip balm

Whilst shopping at Coastal feed store in Mount Vernon a few weeks ago, when I spoiled us with some new tack for Sunshine, I spotted a box of lip balm at the till. I was really just intrigued by the name.



"You never heard of that?" Cowboy said, bemused. "You put chicken poop on your lips. Old cowboy remedy."

I did my best not to think too hard about how that works, and added a tube to our pile of leather and metal on the desk. I then forgot all about it for several days. I eventually remembered, and dug it out to see what on earth I had bought.

Look at this lovely list of ingredients!




No poop! Yay! I slathered it on immediately. The flavour is citrusy and fresh, but leaves a soft and buttery feel on the lips. The consistency is just right - not too firm, not too squishy. I am rapidly wishing I had picked up a fistful of these. If you see some Chicken Poop on your shopping travels, invest. You won't regret it.

P.S. It turns out the "remedy" was that if you put chicken poop on your lips, you wouldn't lick them any longer, thus ending the vicious cycle of chapped lips. Still disgusting.

Visit the website to see other lovely looking products, such as Good Gravey, and Kill It Dead. I'll take them just for the names and scrumptious packaging.

Fixing dried out Mac Fluidline

Thank goodness for the internet.


The other day, I went to apply my favourite eyeliner (Mac Fluidline), which I had foolishly left with the lid off in the hot weather.


It looked very sad indeed. Dry, cracked clean down the middle, and there was no way I was ever going to coax any of that black goodness to come out of the pot and on to my brush, let alone stick on my eyelids.

I became cross with myself for being careless and foolish. I did not want to throw away something perfectly usable, if only I could fix it. Then I became determined not to be defeated by a pot of make up, and began to hit up Google for some solutions to my problem.

When I found one, I was so bemused at how it could work, I put off trying it out until the next morning. It involved eye drops, which intrigued me.

I had some cheap and cheerful eye drops in a drawer, from when I used to commute to work on the underground and my eyes would get very sore and scratchy. I had First World Problems.



I squeezed three drops into the dried up pot, and admittedly, I was a little disappointed that it didn't magically fix itself immediately. The drops sort of rolled around in the crack, and nothing seemed any different. I grabbed a kirby grip (that's a bobby pin to you guys over in the USA - hi!), and started to scrape the eyeliner off the sides of the pot and stir it around with the eyedrops.

At about this point, I thought I had lost my mind and should just throw it all away.



"Never, never, never give up!" Winston Churchill boomed in my head. Besides, I've got an unpleasant tendency to give up something that I am not immediately good at, and that's not a good way to approach life when you're 27 years old and need to get good at something.

So I forged ahead. Once I'd mixed everything together well and smoothed out the paste (and flicked some all over my white desk, hands, fingers, clothes etc), I took a cotton wool bud and started to restore some order to the little pot of horrors.

It took some patience, but it eventually looked like this:



I had to clean up the rim of the pot, and then clean everything around the pot with some make up remover, but I was pretty pleased with it. The gel itself was now the perfect consistency to apply to my eyelids, and gives a good clean, bold line.

I am now obsessive about replacing the lid on the pot, even though I'm armed with this fix now.

Thank you, internet. Specifically, thank you to this page for the original advice that I found.

Edited 12/03/2014: Since I posted this originally, I've had to undertake this whole process twice, as the pot keeps drying out. I'm not that good at the whole lid-replacing thing. I also actually prefer the eyeliner with a softer consistency, and would suggest using four eye drops and making the paste a little thinner. This might prolong the time that it's usable before it needs fixing again.