Why does chapstick taste flavored good on your lips but taste like wax if you eat it?

And your tongue touches your lips often, thus you get to experience the taste without actually consuming a substantial portion of the wax.

Compare this to putting the same stick in your mouth and eating it – the wax would coat your entire mouth quickly, so you’d be feeling the slimeyness much more than tasting anything. Since scent is a portion of taste, I would theorize that the wax coating would prevent air from combining with the artificial flavour, so you may not even be able to taste it after your mouth is entirely coated.

Probably cause you are not supposed to eat it. Didn’t you learn anything in Kindergarten?

Perhaps because something like 70 % of what we perceive as taste actually comes from smell. Eating it gives a serious stimuli to the taste buds, more than being on licked from your lip. You smell it much more than taste it when it’s on your lips.

Why are you eating chapstick?

Don’t drink perfume either.

Vanilla extract- another thing that tastes so much different when consumed.

I think the small amount of flavor in the wax base of the chapstick quickly is absorbed leaving the tasteless wax. Not totally sure though and not willing to experiment.

When you lick your lips, you just get the flavorlike chemicals in the chapstick. When you eat the chapstick, you get all the other waxy ingredients, which dilute the strength of the flavor.

Pretty much what everyone else said.