With winter storms in no short supply this season, you may, like me, be toting a box of tissues with you from room to room in your house.  And with lots of nose blowing, comes lots of irritated, flaky, dry skin.

But for us gluten-free folks, you really can never be too careful, so I did a little research to verify that nose-soothing, lotion-coated tissues are in fact gluten-free.

The reason for my concern was the advertised “Vitamin E” added for skin-softening. As you may know, Vitamin E oil is one of those borderline ingredients. It rarely actually contains gluten, but there is some small chance. You see one very rich source of Vitamin E is wheat germ oil. And while wheat germ oil is often considered gluten-free, there are no guarantees, so it is not always considered a safe ingredient for us.

Well, I did contact Kleenex Brand’s parent company Kimberly-Clark who assured me that no gluten (and also no soy) is used in Kleenex’s Lotion Tissues. So from that perspective they are considered safe.

But as I perused the ingredient list and did a bit of further investigation into what is in these lotion tissues, the key points in my discovery were as follows:

• They are gluten-free.
• According to even EWG’s super conservative SkinDeep Database they had a desirable safety score of a 2.
• The main ingredient is petroleum derived mineral oil, which according to EWG sources has been linked to cancer and is a respiratory toxicant.

Ultimately, even though the risk may be low, I would imagine that stuffing a tissue doused in a respiratory toxicant up my nose would seem counterproductive. So I’m sticking with the un-coated variety, and will simply be lathering up with more gentle, natural lotions.