Why I’m Hoarding My Last Tube of Lip Smacker

The year was 1989—I was 6 years old, and I wanted nothing more than to be just like my older cousin, Julie. She’d come over for play dates with her big case of Jem and the Holograms dolls and her Little Mermaid coloring books, and I thought she was the absolute coolest.

One day, we were playing “beauty salon,” and she brought out a multicolored Caboodles case full of peel-off nail polish and these colorful little tubes of lip balm. One in particular caught my eye—it was labeled “Dr. Pepper.” Amazingly, it smelled and tasted just like my favorite soda flavor. That’s when my love affair with Lip Smackers began.

Over the years, I’ve had several favorite flavors: Strawberry Banana, Watermelon, Bubble Gum, Cotton Candy, and Orange Crush, to name (quite) a few. There was something about keeping a tube of Lip Smacker in my coat pocket in my teen years that always made me feel nostalgic for my childhood.

A few years ago (I was in my twenties by then), I spotted a vintage-looking Lip Smacker display while I was at the drugstore with my BF. I impulsively grabbed a tube of Bubble Gum and started gushing to my boyfriend about all the delightfully colorful memories Lip Smackers brought back.

That Christmas, he surprised me with a giant box of all my favorite flavors. I hoarded them for years. (Full disclosure: I still have a tube of Pink Lemonade at the bottom of my—what else?—Caboodles makeup case.)

So it was with a heavy heart that I found out this week that Lip Smacker’s parent company, Bonne Bell, was going out of business. While the brand is actually being acquired by Markwins (parent company of the other favorite makeup company of my youth, Wet n’ Wild), there’s no word yet on whether they’ll continue to make the Lip Smackers we all know and love or if they’ll be changing the product somehow (we reached out to the company for more info but haven’t heard back as of press time).

Hopefully the brand continues on in some way or another so that we can introduce future generations of girls to Dr. Pepper-flavored lip balm. But just in case, I’ll only be applying thin layers of my last tube of Pink Lemonade (and only on special occasions, of course).

More from Women’s Health:
Can You Actually Become Addicted to Lip Balm?
13 Problems Only Women Who Are Obsessed with Beauty Products Can Understand
7 Random Objects That Can Stand in for Your Hair Tie