How to Stop Chapped Lips In Winter

Nip chapped lips in the bud once and for all!

While the winter air might make our cheeks a little rosier, it doesn’t always do our lips as many favors. If you’ve ever had chapped lips in the winter, you know the struggle when it comes to how to fix chapped lips: as the weather stays cold, your lips stay chapped.

But don’t despair, because you won’t need to wait until spring for your lips to heal. Breaking the cycle of chapped lips in the winter is completely possible! You’re just going to need to give your lips some TLC. Here’s how to fix chapped lips…and how to prevent chapping from happening.

Why Do Lips Get Chapped In Winter?

Even if you’re not someone who experiences chapped lips often, there’s a good chance that when you do, it happens during the winter. The skin on our lips is very different from the skin on the rest of our bodies. It’s much thinner and more delicate. So when our lips aren’t protected from the cold, they can be quite vulnerable.

And when the weather gets chilly outside, we turn on the heat indoors, causing dry, heated air to circulate our living environment. On top of that, we also tend to take hotter showers. While they can feel incredibly soothing on the muscles, the heat can strip your skin of its natural oils, leaving it parched.

Possible Signs of Dry, Chapped Lips

As mentioned above, the skin on our lips is very thin. But what’s more is that it doesn’t have any oil glands, leaving them at risk of becoming chapped. So, how do you know when you have chapped lips? Typically, you have chapped lips if your lips are showing the following signs:

• Dry, scaly lips
• Cracks or small cuts
• Peeling or shedding skin
• Itching, stinging sensations

Chapped lips happen to people of all ages. However, they may happen more to individuals with certain habits, especially those who often lick, bite, or pick at their lips. The good news is, chapped lips can be prevented by certain habits, too.

How to Fix Chapped Lips: Prevention

When the weather gets cold and dry, there are ways to protect your lips and keep them soft and supple. When searching for how to fix chapped lips, the first step is prevention. Here are a few things you can do to prevent chapped lips:

#1: Use an Emollient Lip Balm
Using a lip balm might be one of the more obvious solutions for chapped lips, but for good reason! Using an emollient lip balm, like our Lysine & Herbs Lip Balm, will help lock in moisture and prevent cracking or damage. In particular, look for ingredients like beeswax, propolis, coconut oil, sunflower oil, and shea butter.

#2: Hydrate
It’s important to keep the lips moisturized, but it’s crucial to hydrate the body, as well. Drinking plenty of water each day will have huge benefits for your skin, especially the delicate skin on your lips.

#3: Use a Lip Balm With SPF
We’re ecstatic to see the awareness being spread around sun damage and the importance of sunscreen. But we often forget to protect our lips from the UV rays! Even in the winter, the sun can do damage to your skin. Make sure to wear sunscreen and to grab a lip balm with SPF.

#4: Bundle Up
When we go outside in the cold, we know to put on a pair of gloves in order to protect our hands. But how often are we giving our lips the same protection? On cold, windy days, make sure to grab a scarf or face covering to protect your lips from chapping.

#5: Invest In a Humidifier
It’s not just the cold that’s chapping our lips, it’s also the dry air your heater puts out, especially while you’re sleeping. Luckily, there’s an easy fix for this. Investing in a humidifier can not only give you a better night’s sleep but also help keep your skin and lips from becoming parched at night.

How to Fix Chapped Lips

So, we now have a few tips for preventing chapped lips. But what do you do when the damage has already been done? Let’s talk about how to fix chapped lips. For starters, continue following the tips above. This will help prevent your lips from becoming even more damaged.

Aside from that, the most important thing is to keep them nourished. You may also need to amp up the lip moisturizing when determining how to fix chapped lips.

We encourage you to try something extra-nourishing and emollient on the skin, like Intensive Nourishing Balm. Featuring soothing moisturizers like avocado and shea butter, and antioxidant-rich ingredients like rosehip oil and blackcurrant, this balm is here to revitalize irritated, chapped skin.

Alternatively,  Skin Support Stretch Mark Butter is great for more than stretch marks – it uses ingredients your lips will love, too, like cocoa butter, vitamin E, and shea butter.

When your lips start feeling a little less irritated, you can try a gentle lip scrub, as well, to remove dead, peeling skin. The following scrub uses just three ingredients that help with how to fix chapped lips: coconut oil, brown sugar, and honey. If you follow a vegan lifestyle, you can swap out the honey for agave or maple syrup.

Honey & Coconut Oil Lip Scrub

• 1 teaspoon honey
• 2 teaspoons brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon coconut oil

Simply incorporate these ingredients together in a bowl, and use the scrub to gently massage the skin around your lips. Make sure to follow up with a lip balm. We hope these tips help you on your quest for how to fix chapped lips!