The Most Important Sun Protection You Probably Forgot About

Wheels down in Phoenix. Stepping off the jetway, you’re surrounded by cacti, sand and heat. If you’re lucky, the rental car agency will hand you a bottle of water. You will then chug the water—all of it.

And then you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore, or, in my case, Tennessee. 

There’s a dry heat in Arizona that constantly reminds you to drink. It also reminds you to apply sunscreen. You are in the desert, and the sun blazes over the southwestern landscape like an omnipresent sticky-note for sun protection. But before we get to the crux of this story, I offer a little context:

I found myself in the southwest several months ago for a seven day, FTR-fueled tour of tackle shops and fishing hot spots in the area. Going in, I thought I was prepared for desert hiking, desert fishing, desert photography, and—most of all—desert sun. But while I was busy running my mouth about desert preparedness, I forgot about something essential: my actual mouth.

A SCUBA tank’s worth of sunscreen lingered in the back seat of a cramped (and surprisingly off-road capable) rental car. My face, arms, legs…all were covered here. But I forgot about my lips, and I wasn’t about to throw lotion on them, because that’s not how I roll. Thankfully, along with the SCUBA-size bottles of sun lotion, I had a small tube of Dr. Dan’s SunStick (SPF 30).

Look, I’ll tell you how it is. The good folks at Dr. Dan’s sent me the lip balm container several months before this southwestern expedition. I threw it in my backpack and largely forgot about it. Sorry, Dr. Dan’s.

But sometime between an ill-advised mountain biking detour into Southern Utah and the time I arrived at Lake Powell for an intro to some new fishing rods, I remembered the little tube of lip balm. And it really felt like a life saver.

Feel is important there. I realize that a tube of lip balm is unlikely to literally save a life, but we all know the feeling of chapped lips. You know the one, where you’re almost sure that your lips are about to burst into a prehistoric lava flow at any moment, the one where you’re guzzling soda and water in the hopes of stemming the discomfort, the one where your Camelback starts leaking on you halfway up a deserted mountain bike trail and you really don’t want to spend your precious water reserve on a temporary lip problem.

Okay, maybe the last one is a little over the top, but if you’re an angler, you definitely know the feeling of speeding down the lake on the way to your sure-fire fishing hole, only to arrive with dry, cracked lips.

Because you’re an angler, you’re a tough guy; you don’t care that your lips are cracking. But you should.

Chapped lips are a serious medical condition—a condition that Dr. Dan’s has been medically recommended to fix for years. And while a tube of Sunstick will keep your lady (or gentleman) lovers safe from the sun, a tube of Dr. Dan’s Cortibalm will bring them back to life after a few too many days in the sun.

That’s because Dr. Dan’s makes the real stuff. Talk to them for a bit, and you’ll learn a few things:

• Many other lip-balms are made with harsh chemicals that actually dry your lips.
• Dr. Dan’s products are hypoallergenic. There are no scents or smells (excluding the anti-itch stick that contains menthol) that could cause an unwanted reaction, or weird after scent when you kiss that fish. We know you do, weirdos.
• Dr. Dan’s doesn’t focus on moving volume. They focus on making a great product, and would rather have your customers purchase one tube a year for life than ten tubes for a year.
• Dr. Dan’s wants to become the brand that any outdoorsman thinks about when they think of skincare. And they want anglers to stop feeling like a rolled up dryer sheet when they turn off the big motor.

Now, you are officially an educated lip balm consumer (and hopefully retailer), but because Dr. Dan’s is an awesome company, and because we like their product a lot, FTR is going to give you a free tube of Dr. Dan’s Cortibalm at ICAST Booth 1903—the same stuff that saved my face in the desert.

Go ahead, give it a try. If you don’t love it, you can tell me exactly how you feel in the comment section below. If you do love, be kind and share the love with your customers by joining Dr. Dan’s distributor program.

You can visit Dr. Dan’s at ICAST Booth 3560. Look for SunStick in the New Product Showcase presented by Fishing Tackle Retailer.