What the beeswax?

I am one person who has been plagued with one allergy or another all her life.  Grasses, pollens, whatever could make me sneeze, did.  I felt like I always had a cold.  So it shouldn't surprise me when something else crops up, but it always does.  Like the time I was in the hospital with heart flutters and they gave me chamomile tea and I burst out into hives.  Always an adventure with me!

So in the fall of 2016, suddenly my lips and the area around them got swollen, weepy, and my skin was sloughing off.  I could not for the life of me figure out what was going on.  I went to the doctor.  She told me I had impetigo.  What?!?!?!? So after a course of antibiotics did nothing, I went to another doctor who told me that I had chelitis.  No cream or potion was helping.  I resorted to putting hydrocortisone cream directly on my lips. It was embarrassing to go out to eat.   The minute I opened my mouth, my skin would split and my makeup would part like Moses parted the red sea, leaving me with a red weepy ring around my mouth.

At that time I was convinced it was a nutritional deficiency, so I was loading up on B6.  In the meantime I had completely changed out my lip balm supply just in case it was something contagious. And I switched up the brands just in case it was the coconut oil.  Something I was doing was working, and I was convinced it was the B6 since I had been tolerating coconut fine.  Finally my skin was healing.

Then one night I woke up a bit parched and I rummaged through my nightstand looking for a lip balm. I had a lingering tube of the coconut oil and beeswax lip balm that just didn't get thrown away for one reason or another, so I used it.  Then I woke up in the morning to itchy and swollen lips.

Thanks to help from Doctor Google, I was able to finally find the source of the problem.  Very few people report beeswax allergies, but there are a couple out there.

That is not the end of my story, however. On a Facebook group for food allergies I discovered another person with a beeswax allergy.  We started chatting and she was explaining to me all the things beeswax can hide in (carnuba wax being one).  I showed her a picture of what my lips looked like and then it hit me.  In this picture there are sores on my chin.  Sores I have had ever since then that I could not heal!

Yes, it just happened to be that the concealer that I used to hide those sores.....carnuba wax.  In fact, many of my cosmetics contain it.  Even the Cherry Chapstick that I thought was safe has it.

Now, from reading up about it, the allergy isn't actually to the wax.  It is the propolis, which is a glue that holds the wax together and is created by bees from the resins and buds of trees.  So essentially if you can find a cleaned and decontaminated beeswax, it should not be an issue.  This may be the case with the Chapstick I had been using as I didn't have a flare up on my lips.  And just because it has carnuba wax doesn't mean there is definitely beeswax in there, it just means that it is often mixed with it.

What this means is that now along with all the other vegan alternatives to egg and dairy that are super expensive, I get to buy vegan makeup which is also crazy expensive.  I may never retire.

I did it! Vegan Egg Yolk!

I finally figured out how to make vegan egg yolk  You'll have to probably get many of the ingredients on Amazon, but it's worth it! 

Vegan Egg Yolk Mix

★★★★★

Difficulty: Easy

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup and 1 Tbsp Sodium Alginate
• 1 1/2 cups Nutritional Yeast, Red Star preferred
• 3 Tbsp Kala Namak salt
• 1 Tbsp beta carotene
•

Note: Some brands of Kala Namak are saltier than others, so you can undercut that a bit to fit your taste.

Directions:

Mix all ingredients well.

For each 1/4 cup of hot water, add 1 tsp of mix to start. Add the mix to the water, not the water to the mix, or it will clump. You can get it to mix better by putting it in the microwave a few seconds at a time. Add more mix to get desired consistency.