Why Winter Goes Straight for Your Lips and Hands

Your face can be coping fine, and yet your lips are cracked, the backs of your hands feel like paper, and your cuticles have started splitting. Winter doesn't hit all of you evenly. It goes for the extremities first, the lips, the hands, the knuckles, and it goes for them hard.

There's a reason those particular bits suffer while the rest of you holds up, and once you know it, keeping them comfortable through the cold months gets a lot easier.

Your lips were never built to cope

Most people don't realise this about their lips. The skin there is different to the skin everywhere else, and it's at a real disadvantage in winter.

Lip skin is extraordinarily thin, a fraction of the thickness of the skin on your cheeks. And crucially, your lips have almost no oil glands of their own. Everywhere else on your body, tiny glands pump out a bit of natural oil that keeps the skin supple and sealed. Your lips don't really get that. They can't keep themselves moisturised, so they rely entirely on what's around them. In warm, damp air they manage. In cold, dry, heated-indoor air, they lose moisture fast and have no way to replace it. So they dry, tighten, and crack.

And licking them makes it worse

When your lips feel dry, the natural instinct is to lick them. It feels like relief for about three seconds. Then it makes everything worse.

Saliva evaporates quickly, and as it goes it drags even more moisture out of your lips than before. On top of that, saliva carries digestive enzymes, the stuff designed to start breaking down your food, and leaving that sitting on delicate lip skin irritates it further. So the lick-dry-lick cycle slowly turns mildly dry lips into properly sore, cracked ones. Breaking that habit is half the battle.

Why your hands take such a beating

Your hands have a similar problem, made worse by everything you put them through.

The backs of your hands have very few oil glands too, so like your lips they struggle to keep themselves protected. Then add a winter's worth of hand-washing, cold water, wind, and the odd blast of hand sanitiser, each one stripping away what little protective oil is there. The skin dries, loses its stretch, and starts to crack, usually over the knuckles and around the nails where it bends and moves most. Cuticles split, and if you've ever had a cracked fingertip in January you'll know how something so small can be so sore.

How to actually keep them comfortable

The fix for all of this is the same idea: since these bits can't seal themselves, you seal them from the outside, and you do it often.

Use a proper balm, not a quick swipe of something waxy. You want something rich, made with natural butters and beeswax that actually sit on the skin and lock moisture in, rather than a cheap flavoured stick that's gone in ten minutes. A good balm forms a protective layer that does the job your own oil glands can't.

Put it on before you need it, not after. The trick is to stay ahead. Balm on the lips and hands before you head out into the cold, and again before bed, so they repair overnight. Waiting until they're already cracked is playing catch-up.

Stop licking, and reach for balm instead. Every time you go to lick your lips, that's the cue to put balm on instead. It takes a few days to break the habit, then they settle remarkably quickly.

Moisturise hands after every wash. This is the big one for hands. Washing is when you strip the oils, so that's when to put them back. Keep a balm or cream by the sink and use it.

Protect them from the cold directly. Gloves on cold days, a scarf you can pull up over your mouth in a biting wind. Keeping the cold air off them in the first place means less damage to undo.

Most dry, cracked lips and hands sort themselves out quickly once you start sealing and protecting them properly. Persistently cracked skin however can sometimes point to a deficiency or a skin condition that needs a bit more than balm.

For the ordinary winter wear and tear though, a good balm used often is one of those small things that makes the cold months noticeably more comfortable. Look after the bits that can't look after themselves.