pocket treasure

In June, my friend Tina sent me a sweet, chocolate-themed care package that included a stick of ISUN Antioxidant Lip Balm. She wrote that it was "incredibly nutritious and delicious," and implored me to "Read the ingredients!" I'm sharing the ingredients with you here as they appear on the tube, since a list like this brings me such delight (especially since it catalogs the herb oils by name, rather than lumping them together as "fragrance" or "essential oils," as so many ingredient-lists do):

Beeswax;  Mango seed butter, Olive butter, Herb oil (Jojoba oil, Life everlasting, Green tea, Gotu cola, Rosemary, Calendula, Lavender, Milk-thistle, Lemon balm, Licorice rt, Roobibos, Hibiscus, Rodiola, Gingko, Plantain, Amla, Ashwaghanda, Acai, Goji berry, Horsetail, Comfrey lvs, Comfrey rt, Rose petal, Echinacea, Ginseng, Lotus, Boswellia, Blue violet); Avocado butter;  Aloe butter;  Buriti oil; Kokum butter; Vit E tocopherols; Goji berry oil; Acai oil; Urucum oil; Raspberry oil; Rosehip ext; Seabuckthornberry ext; Cocoa absolute; Vanilla absolute; Orange oil 

Isn't that a lovely list? Seabuckthornberry,  I could say it all day. And the best part is that this lip balm is reminiscent of Aftelier's Cacao, enough so that using it brings back some of the same happy memories that Cacao does when I dab it on my wrists. Cacao is one of my favorite perfumes, and I travel with the mini, so wearing it transports me especially, to a cement room in a 12th-century house in rural France; a hot-rock beach in summertime Nice; and a pine-strewn Pacific Northwest forest, clouds heavy with rain. I'd love to own the Cacao EDP one day, spray myself silly with it, dab a bit of the perfume on my wrists, put on a little ISUN lip balm, and take myself out into the world smelling like some of the happiest days I can remember (and like cocoa and blood orange and jasmine, too).