The Best Squalane Lip Balms

Why the ranking is this lopsided. On most of our roundups the picks are close and the choice comes down to price or texture. Not here. The Ordinary's balm lists squalane first out of twenty-seven ingredients; the next closest puts it eighth; the last puts it sixteenth out of twenty-three. That is not a subtle difference in formulation philosophy, it is the difference between a squalane balm and a balm that contains some squalane. All four are perfectly usable lip products — the sunflower, jojoba, shea and castor oils in the other three are real emollients doing real work — but if the word squalane is why you clicked, only one of them is actually selling you that.

Added flavor is the thing to check on a lip balm. Everywhere else on your face the ingredient to watch is fragrance. On lips it is flavor, which is the same class of ingredient wearing a different label, and it is in three of the four balms here. On healthy lips that is usually a non-issue and, for a lot of people, part of why a balm is pleasant to use. On lips that are split, peeling or chapped raw, a flavor compound is exactly what makes a balm sting and exactly what keeps you reapplying something that is quietly making things worse. If your lips are in bad shape right now, the flavor-free option is the one to reach for, and the sensible move is to keep a plain balm for the bad weeks and a flavored one for the good ones.

The cheapest lip routine is a bottle of plain squalane. If what you want is squalane on your lips rather than a specific balm, the most efficient route is the same bottle of 100% squalane oil you would use on your face. A drop rubbed in with a fingertip does the same job an emollient balm does, it costs a small fraction per ounce of anything on this page, there is no flavor in it at all, and it is the same molecule these balms advertise. Our squalane for lips guide covers how to use it that way, including the overnight trick of squalane under a thicker occlusive balm, and our oils roundup has the bottles worth buying. We earn less when you take that route, which is precisely why it is worth saying.

What squalane will and will not do for lips. It softens, it makes lips more comfortable, and it slows the water loss that leaves them tight and flaking — that is a real and useful list. It will not repair severely cracked or bleeding lips on its own, it will not treat angular cheilitis or a cold sore, and it will not plump anything. Lips that stay cracked despite consistent balm use, or that are painful, split at the corners, or peeling in sheets, are worth showing to a doctor rather than escalating through more expensive balms. Persistent chapping that will not respond to anything is occasionally a sign of something a balm cannot fix.

How to actually use one. Apply after eating and drinking rather than before, because that is what removes it; reapply before bed, when you get the longest uninterrupted stretch of wear; and stop licking, which is the single biggest reversible cause of chapped lips because evaporating saliva takes more water with it than it leaves behind. Exfoliating scrubs on already-damaged lips are usually a mistake — softening and leaving them alone works better than sanding them. And if you use a tinted or glossy balm as makeup, it is worth owning a plain one for overnight, when nobody is looking at the color.

What we left out, and why. Several well-known lip balms turn up in searches for squalane without containing any — we only featured products with squalane on the published ingredient list. We also left out the multi-shade sets and the bundles, because the cost per ounce on a bundle is impossible to compare honestly against a single unit. And the obvious omission: the 100% squalane oils we recommend elsewhere are not on this page, because they are not lip balms. As the section above says, they are also the cheapest way to get this exact ingredient onto your lips, and for a lot of readers they are the right answer.

The bottom line. If you want a squalane lip balm — the ingredient, doing the work, with nothing in it to sting — it is The Ordinary Squalane + Amino Acids Hydrating Lip Balm, which puts squalane first on the list, adds real humectants behind it, contains no flavor or fragrance at all, and costs less per ounce than all but one of the alternatives. If you want something that also looks like makeup, the Biossance Pro-Peptide Lip Perfector is the nicest to wear and adds a peptide and hyaluronic acid, as long as you go in knowing squalane is eighth on its list and that you are paying the most per ounce on this page for it. Those are the two honest recommendations; the other two are pleasant balms whose front labels promise more squalane than their ingredient lists deliver.