Home remedies · Mouth, teeth, eyes & feet
No home remedy here replaces treatment, and none is talked down. What has done good for generations does good — even if no one ever measured it. Where something is well studied, it says so. Where it is only experience, it says that too.
Apply a purely greasy product thinly — beeswax with oil, lanolin, petroleum jelly, or a balm without fragrance, menthol and camphor. Several times a day and always before going out into the cold. Thicker overnight. And the main thing: stop licking your lips.
Lip skin has no sebaceous glands. What protects the rest of the body from drying out — a thin film of fat it makes itself — is entirely missing here, and the horny layer is thinner than anywhere else on the face. So only fat from outside helps, and that is why it helps at once: it replaces exactly what is missing and slows evaporation. Licking does the opposite. Saliva evaporates within a minute and takes water out of the horny layer with it; it also contains digestive enzymes that attack the thin skin. Hence the circle: lick, briefly moist, drier than before, lick again.
Balms with menthol, camphor, peppermint or fragrance cool briefly and then irritate — they keep the circle going instead of ending it. Cracked corners of the mouth are a different matter from dry lips: a yeast or a shortage of iron, zinc or B vitamins often sits behind them, and fat alone is not enough.
With a spot on the lip that will not heal after three weeks, with a hardened or bleeding place, with recurring blisters, with cracked corners that keep coming back, and with lips that swell — that is not dryness.
To the doctor or dentist: facial swelling with fever, toothache with trouble opening the mouth, a knocked-out tooth — that is an emergency with a short window. For the eye: sudden loss of vision, severe pain, flashes of light. Sore places in the mouth lasting beyond three weeks.