A kiss that leaves them numb.
That’s the promise of a new line of lip balm dubbed Morphine Lips by Irvine’s Afsheen “Sheen” Moaleman.
Moaleman, who studied marketing at California University Polytechnic, Pomona, said he didn’t know a thing about making lip balms, let alone one with a twist.
His lip balm has a “numbing, tingling effect” when applied or passed on to someone else with a kiss.
Benzocaine
The balm uses benzocaine, a topical numbing agent used in Orajel tooth relief medicine and over-the-counter sunburn relieving products.
Morphine Lips uses 3.8% benzocaine—the maximum amount in consumer products is 20%—and mixes it with a peach-mango flavoring, according to Moaleman.
Moaleman runs the business out of his Irvine home. The balms are made in Chatsworth.
Learning how to make lip balm was easier than expected, he said.
“I Googled how to make it,” Moaleman said. “Then I mixed all these different ingredients and made different lip balm recipes, gave them to friends to test for me, and altered them from there.”
The name Morphine Lips comes from the song “Lips Like Morphine” by the Chicago band Kill Hannah.
Moaleman, whose parents are from Iran and came here as young adults, said it was one of those songs “that everyone liked, even people who didn’t like rock.”
After spending time as an intern in the fashion world, Moaleman graduated college and couldn’t find that dream job he was looking for.
“I just decided to make something instead,” the 26-year-old said.
After mulling the idea for two years, it was on Moaleman’s way back from Las Vegas in September that he decided to start the business.
By the end of the month, he was looking at how to register a web domain and trademarks.
The hardest part in creating the product was the look and design of the tubes that hold the lip balm. Those alone are just less than $1 to produce. He declined to give the full cost of what it takes to make each lip balm.
The product is sold on the company’s website and at some local boutiques such as Kitson in Los Angeles. It sells for about $20.
There are plenty of cosmetic lines that offer lip balms and glosses, including Fresh Inc., Bare Escentuals Beauty Inc. and Smashbox Cosmetics.
Lip products are a sizable niche. Yearly sales of lip color (those with tinting or coloring) in U.S. department stores are about $265 million, according to NPD Group Inc., a Port Washington, N.Y.-based market researcher.
Yearly lip gloss sales are about $185 million, according to NPD.
Moaleman is in talks with three potential retailers in Hong Kong and another in the U.S., which he declined to name.
The U.S. retailer wants to test out the product online to gauge what markets or stores they want to have it in, he said.
He said he also just signed with a sales and distribution company and is in the early phases of putting together a plan with them.
Next up: a lip gloss.
“We’re in development on that right now,” Moaleman said. “We’re working on the packaging now and starting the formula.”
Production is set to happen in six to eight months, he said.
Startup
Moaleman said he spent about $50,000 to start the company. His parents each gave him a good portion of that money. He sold his car to generate the rest of the startup cash.
For now, Moaleman is the only employee. Friends have helped along the way, creating his website, helping with marketing, shipping and the company’s logo and other design work, he said.
He’s working on branding the company’s image and products to reflect “high fashion colliding with rock ’n’ roll,” he said.
For now, the focus is on the products.
“The lip balm—minus the numbing factor—is a really great, moisturizing lip product,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a novelty item. It had to have a purpose as well.”
He said he’s also looking at a non-numbing lip balm.
“My biggest fear is that I’ve been given an opportunity people would kill for, and I don’t want to look back and say ‘I wish I would have tried harder.’”
Gomez is a former Business Journal editor and freelance writer based in Long Beach.
