Julep It's Balm Tinted Lip Balm Review

Burt's Bees Tinted Lip Balm costs under $5 a tube. Julep's It's Balm costs $16, more than three times as much. That's a real enough gap in price to ask what the extra money is actually buying.

Short answer: sort of, but not the thing the listing wants you to think it's doing.

Let's deal with the "hydrating long-wear colour" claim first, because it's the one that doesn't hold up. The tint and shine on this fade within a few hours, and going by other reviewers' experience, sometimes as little as two to three hours before you need to touch it up. Eating or drinking is enough to wear it down according to those same reports, and you're reapplying. That's not really "long-wear" in any meaningful sense, and it's more or less identical to what you get from Burt's Bees, which also needs topping up after eating or drinking. So on the headline promise, the expensive one doesn't out-perform the cheap one.

Where it does pull ahead is underneath the colour. The sunflower butter and vitamin E core gets genuine, repeated praise from people with chronically dry or flaky lips for keeping them comfortable without feeling heavy or waxy, even once the tint itself has worn off. It's a semi-gloss finish with no shimmer, understated rather than costume-bright, and it sits fine under or over other products.

The bit that actually matters, and the bit Julep isn't shouting about, is what's in it versus what's in Burt's Bees. Burt's Bees' Tinted Lip Balm lists beeswax and lanolin on the ingredient panel. Lanolin was named the American Contact Dermatitis Society's Allergen of the Year for 2023, and dermatologists flag it as a particular risk for lips that are already dry, chapped or irritated, the exact condition someone reaching for a lip balm usually has. Dermatologist Dr. Rajani Katta has also written about treating multiple patients with allergic reactions to Burt's Bees lip balms specifically, driven mainly by its fragrance and flavouring ingredients, and includes it on the list of chapsticks she has lip-allergy patients eliminate altogether. Julep's formula, by contrast, is vegan, so beeswax-free, and paraben-free. If you or your child have ever had lip irritation you couldn't explain, that's a real, practical reason to pick this over the drugstore staple, not just clean-beauty marketing dressing up the same product.

Two things knock it down a peg, though. Some buyers report the twist-up cap popping loose in bags, smearing product over other stuff. Not a huge deal, but annoying when you're already running late. And the shade accuracy is a bit hit and miss, some of the neutrals come out warmer or more pigmented in person than they look online, so don't expect the swatch photo to be gospel. Some buyers have also flagged that the fill amount isn't always consistent between shades, even at the same price, which is the kind of thing that makes you feel a bit short-changed even if it's a small thing.

So is it worth more than three times the price of Burt's Bees? If your lips are sensitive or you've had reactions to beeswax or lanolin before, yes, that's a genuine point of difference and worth paying for. If you just want a cheap tinted balm for your bag that does roughly the same job for roughly the same amount of time, you're not missing anything by sticking with what you've already got.