How to Cure Chapped Lips Fast without Chapstick? | What Are Dry, Cracked and Chapped Lips? | What Causes Chapped and Cracked Lips? | Chapped Lips Home Remedies To Get Soft, Smooth and Pink Lips | Tips To Prevent Dry Lips During Winter Season | Why Won’t My Chapped Lips Heal?
What Exactly Are Dry, Cracked and Chapped Lips?
Chapped Lips is also popular as Cheilitis / Inflammation of the lips (Scientific Binomial Name), Cracked Lips (Common English), (Unani), Fate honth (Hindi / Urdu), Chapped utatukal (Tamil), Oth fatane (Marathi), (Sanskrit), kate thomta (Bengali), Pagilina pedalu (Telugu), Onagida tutigalannu (Kannada), chapped adharannal(Malayalam), Zuichun ganlie (Chinese), labios agrietados (Spanish), labios rachados (Portuguese), potreskavshiyesya guby (Russian).
What Causes Dry and Cracked Lips?
Your lips are dry, irritated, and cracked. They may be painful or they may itch. Sunburn, winter weather, allergic reactions, fever, or simply licking your lips too often can cause dry lips. Some individuals inadvertently bite the delicate tissues in their cheeks or lips during sleep, or even while chewing or talking. Dehydration and canker sores can also be reason for lip pain. Whether they are responding to cold weather, an arid climate, or are just naturally dry, chapped lips are a pain. Cracking, flaking, and chapping are not only uncomfortable but also unsightly, and lipstick only seems to make the situation worse. You can solve those dry-lips blues with consistency and patience.
How to cure cracked dry lips fast without chapstick?
There are lots of emollient lip products that do just that, and the more emollient they are, the better. Ingredients like lanolin, oils of any kind (including castor oil, lanolin oil, safflower oil, almond oil, and vegetable oil), and shea and cocoa butter are all excellent, especially if they are listed at the beginning of the ingredient list. However, many lip products are little more than waxy coatings that make lips feel thickly protected when they are applied (ChapStick is a great example), but they don’t really moisturize or provide adequate protection from the weather or from the dry heat and air-conditioning you find indoors. Here are some home remedies those not only heals cracked lips but make they look more beautiful and moist. 18 Best chapped lips home remedies to get soft, smooth and pink lips.
Chapped Lips Home Remedies
- DIY Honey Lip Balm: Place 225 ml sweet almond oil and 110 g beeswax in a microwave safe bowl. Microwave on high for about one minute, until the mixture melts. Whisk 2 tbsp honey into the wax. When cool, pour into small containers with lids. Apply to lips as a moisturizer or on top of lipstick for extra shine. This might be a nice present for friends, as the amount you make would take ages to use, or you could halve the quantities. Be very careful with hot beeswax.
- Keep Lips Moist: Rub some avocado on lips to keep them nice and moist.
- Soothe Chapped Lips: Dairy farmers use Bag Balm to keep their cows’ udders soft and comfortable. Humans have found that this product, formulated with lanolin and petrolatum soothes a chapped lips.
- Jojoba for Common Cheilitis: Combine 2 drops of chamomile oil and 2 drops of jojoba oil and apply to lips as needed.
- Lipstick To Treat Dry Effect: When your lips are chapped and dry, take an unpeeled cucumber, wipe it off good, pucker up your lips as if to put on lipstick, then just run the skin surface slowly across them in a back and-forth motion. This does a fairly nice job of lubricating them. Cucumbers have moderate amounts of fat in their skins. Notice the slightly greasy or oily feeling to the skin.
- Another all-natural salve is Burt’s Beeswax Lip Balm, which contains beeswax, coconut oil, sweet almond oil, lanolin, vitamin E, peppermint oil, and comfrey extract.
- Cure Burning Sensation: If lip burning sensation is due to cold sores then using a clean fingertip or gauze, apply the honey to the cold sore five or six times a day. Each time, leave on for 15 minutes and then wash off. Honey has antiviral and wound healing activity. Honey was superior to the drug in reducing pain and crusting and hastening healing time.
- Some people swear by Cloverine salve to relieve chapped lips. It also works on chapped hands.
- Cracks and Crows Feet Healing: Cut the grapes in half and slowly squeeze the juice on the lips. Also rub some of the juice around the corners of the mouth. It is great for getting rid of crow’s feet and the tiny cracks around the edges of the mouth.
- Homemade First-Aid Salve: It is also helpful to heal minor cuts and scrapes as well as chapped and cracked hands. Take calendula flowers, comfrey leaves, St. John’s wort flowers, echinacea leaves and flowers. All herbs must be well dry and taken in equal quantity. For this recipe take all 6 g. Place the herbs in a clean pint size jar. Cover the herbs with extra-virgin olive oil, stir, and add more oil until you have a good 1 inch of oil above the line of the herbs. You can add other oil such as almond, apricot, avocado, or grape seed oil instead of olive oil. Cap tightly. Place in a sunny window for two to four weeks. If the herbs sop up more oil, add extra oil to maintain the 1-inch margin on top. At the end of the steeping period, the oil will have turned a greenish hue. You may also see some red color from the St. John’s wort flowers. Strain the oil. Measure the herbal oil. To thicken the oil to a soft salve consistency, you need one part beeswax. For a firmer consistency, like that of lip balm, use one part beeswax to four parts oil. Put water in the bottom part of a double boiler. Heat to boiling, and then lower the heat to a simmer. Pour the oil into the top of double boiler and add the beeswax. Stir until the beeswax melts, and immediately transfer it to the clean jar and cap tightly. Apply as needed. Store in the refrigerator for up to six months.
- Soft Moisturizer: When you’re alone in the house, olive oil or Crisco will help to soften and moisturize chapped lips quite nicely. In fact, any vegetable shortening will do.
- Home Treatment for Cracked Skin: Yarrow tea and chamomile hand cream is very effective in the treatment of cracked lips. It is also good to treat sore nipples, chapped hands, weathered skin, herpes sores, hives, hemorrhoids and minor bleeding.
- Fight Fungal Infection: If the corners of your mouth are painfully cracked and chapped, you may have a yeast overgrowth. To help clear the yeast, use over-the-counter anti fungal cream available at drug store. Apply it twice a day. If you wear dentures and have this condition, be sure you clean your dentures thoroughly and frequently. Yeast can grow on them and spread by contact to your lips.
- The Ultimate Lip Balm: Both yellow beeswax straight from the hive and the commercially bleached white beeswax are used extensively in lipsticks. If you have beekeepers in your immediate area, then visit one of them sometime and purchase a little beeswax. It keeps well in a cool, dry place. Whenever you are out in the sun or wind too long, just carry some of this with you and rub a little bit over your lips every now and then. You’ll find it keeps them nice and moist and soft.
- If you have vitamin E capsules on hand, puncture one and apply the oil to your lips.
- Time Tested Remedy: Petroleum jelly is a tried and true chapped lips remedy. For the healing power of petroleum jelly with more staying power, try Aquaphor, a heavy cream available in the drugstore’s skin-care section. It tends to stay on longer than petroleum jelly. Like Bag Balm, it contains lanolin.
- Prevent Dryness: If your lips are continually chapped, drink eight 8 ounce glasses of water a day, if you can. While this won’t prevent dryness, it will keep it from getting worse.
- Fever Blisters on Lips: Empty contents of 2 capsules of powdered myrrh gum onto the surface of a clean plate. I recommend Nature’s Way brand for myrrh gum. Take 2 cotton swabs. Wet them under the tap before dipping them into the powder and apply them directly to the lips. It is helpful for fever blisters that form on the lips. This is also helpful to treat canker sores.
Tips To Prevent Dry Lips in Winter Season
Apart from above mentioned chapped lips home remedies, here are few tips to prevent dry lips in first place. Lips are more vulnerable to the environment than any other part of the face. This means that keeping your lips moist and sealed against the weather is essential.
- Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine) deficiency can cause chapped lips. Include meats, poultry, egg yolk, soy, peanuts, bananas, potatoes, whole grains, and cauliflower in your diet to get sufficient amount of vitamin B6.
- A dark, creamy lipstick helps protect lips from the sun and keep moisture in. At night you can apply almost any lip balm, but for daytime care, it is best to use an SPF 15 lip balm that contains either avobenzone, Tinosorb, ecamsule (Mexoryl SX), titanium dioxide, or zinc oxide.
- A burning sensation in lips can be due to deficiency of vitamin B2 (riboflavin). The main sources of this vitamin are green leafy vegetables, milk, cheese, wheat germ, egg, almonds, sunflower, seeds, citrus fruits and tomatoes. Try including them in everyday diet.
- When indoor air is very dry, prevent chapped lips by running a humidifier in your bedroom while you sleep.
- The lips form a delicate and sensitive mucocutaneous junction. Be careful while shaving to avoid injury.
- Avoid licking your lips. Your saliva may momentarily provide a coating of moisture, but it evaporates quickly, leaving lips drier than before. And the saliva contains digestive enzymes that dry out tissue.
- Wear a sunblock on your lips when you go outside. Bright sunlight can trigger burning.
- Don’t give a child lip balms with exotic flavors. Kids tend to eat the flavored varieties right off their lips, which further aggravates the chapping.
- Lots of lip products also claim to be medicated. “Medicated,” however, is at best a dubious term, and it has no regulated meaning when it comes to lip balms. These “medicated” products usually contain camphor, menthol, peppermint oil, and eucalyptus, but these are not medicines for dry lips! They mostly irritate and can actually make lips burn, which is neither disinfecting nor helpful for lips that are already dry and chapped. Phenol, from lip balms, is strong stuff and can actually trigger serious irritation and dryness all by itself.
Why Won’t My Chapped Lips Heal with Home Remedies?
If lips remain chapped after you’ve babied them for two or three weeks, it’s time to make a call to the dermatologist. Don’t panic, but lips that are persistently red, dry, or scaly can suggest a precancerous condition. Also make a call to dermatologist if your lips are often cracked; you may have a yeast infection. An allergic sensitivity to ingredients in toothpaste, lipstick, or lip balms can also cause dry lips.