It arrived in my basket by accident, next to someone else’s Christmas present. It’s turned out to be the best little treat I bought just for myself.

I found NEOM’s Great Day Wonder Balm the way I find most good things lately — completely by accident, while I was meant to be doing something else entirely. It was December, I was deep in Christmas shopping for everyone except myself, feeling frazzled in that specific pre-Christmas way, and this little pot ended up in my basket. What actually stopped me was the label: Have a great day. Not “smells nice.” Not “for dry lips.” Just a small, direct instruction, sitting there in gold lettering, at a moment I badly needed one.

I’d wanted NEOM’s candles for years, and I finally got their Christmas one that year too — which, sadly, met an early end when the glass cracked and I had to throw it out for safety’s sake. I was genuinely sad about that candle. But it’s this small, unglamorous pot of lip balm that’s quietly outlasted it as my actual favourite thing in the NEOM range.

It’s the last thing I put on before I start my makeup. Every single time, without fail, there’s this brief moment — maybe two seconds — where the scent hits and I actually feel lighter. It’s such a small ritual, but it works on me the same way every time, with the little pot’s instruction to have a great day.

What’s actually in the pot

Under the marketing, the balm is a proper little formula: sweet almond oil, shea butter, beeswax, castor and olive oils holding it together, and a blend of eight essential oils built around wild mint (spearmint and peppermint) and mandarin. NEOM has always been fairly serious about using genuine essential oils rather than just synthetic fragrance dressed up as aromatherapy, and you can tell — the scent doesn’t smell artificial or trying too hard. It smells fresh with a faint sweet orange blossom scent with mint and extremely moisturising.

Why it’s not just marketing

Here’s the part I found genuinely interesting when I looked into it: your sense of smell is the only one of your five senses with a direct line into the limbic system, the part of your brain handling emotion and memory. Sight, sound, and touch all get routed through a kind of relay station first. Smell doesn’t. It goes straight in. Which is a scientific way of explaining why a two-second sniff of lip balm can shift your mood before your brain has even worked out why.

The two ingredients doing the heavy lifting here both have real research behind them, not just NEOM’s word for it. Mandarin belongs to the citrus family, and citrus scents have been shown to stimulate the release of norepinephrine — a neurotransmitter tied to alertness and energy, which is a large part of why citrus scents feel so instantly “wake-up.” Peppermint has an even more specific track record: multiple studies, including work using EEG monitoring on actual drivers, have found peppermint aroma measurably increases alertness and reduces mental fatigue, alongside boosting mood and short-term memory in the process. So “wild mint and mandarin… to make you happy” isn’t just a nice sentence on a box. It’s more or less a summary of the neuroscience.

The lipstick photo

The photo of me wearing lipstick is the balm doing its job, underneath a Chanel lipstick I love. It’s not a groundbreaking beauty discovery — balm under lipstick is hardly new — but there’s something about this particular pairing that makes me smile every time I catch sight of it in the mirror. Maybe it’s the mint waking me up before the day’s even started. Maybe it’s just the lovely smell. Either way, it’s earned its place as a genuine daily habit, not just a Christmas impulse buy that got lucky.