Thanks JSL :) I believe I personally have figured out what EC actually is, whether or not anyone believes me is beside the point :) oh and the "hits" thing you're referring to gets upcounted each time you refresh the page, so if a person refreshes the page a few times it counts as more hits, so it doesn't mean different people are looking at the post.

And to answer your question on my thoughts:

EC is simply put Trauma to the Lips. This can be from the overuse of chapstick, lip biting/picking, etc. The only reason it happens to some people and not others is simply by how sensitive your skin is. I have EXTREMELY sensitive skin...hence why my EC got so bad. A lot people believe that this happened overnight, which yes the peeling may have started overnight, but the peeling is the final stage of EC. There is the beginning stage where the lips just appear to be dry. From the people that I have talked to who say it happened overnight, they were using chapsticks to prevent dry lips to begin with. And the one's who weren't using any lip balms said they were lip biters/pickers. If there are those out there that had nothing to do I'd be happy to take a look closer at your story and figure it out. Another way is swelling of the lips, for me the breaking point was the dentist and flossing my teeth with regular floss, stretching my lips considerably. My lips began to swell from this, which caused them to become dry...eventually the began peeling.

Now to answer the question WHY it takes so long to heal. Well the first thing is you have to get rid of what caused your lips to swell/dry up in the first place. Be it from accutane, biting, chapstick, stretching from flossing, chemical in a toothpaste, saliva being too acidic, etc.

Once you have eliminated that problem ONLY THEN can you begin to actually heal your lips. This process takes a long time, and the reason I have come up with is because mucous membranes are not the same as normal skin, this skin looks differently. (I had EC on the outer areas of my mouth and it was impossible to notice unless I was shaving with my electric shaver and it rubbed the dead skin off.)

The next thing is swelling reduction. This process takes forever for some reason and I don't know why. Each cell cycle from birth to death is about one month. For the lips to reduce to their normal size the cells have to layer by layer reduce themselves. This requires them to go through one cell cycle at a time until the lips are normal sized again (the brain knows exactly how big the lips are supposed to be). And by continuing talking and moving of the lips from eating/drinking causing furthur trauma, this process is only legnthend further.

The next step in healing the lips (which happens at the same time as the previous) is telling the brain to quit sending the "healing signal" to the lips. (I don't know if this actually happens or not, but is the only other logical thing I can come up with for the time factor). Since I had been peeling my lips for years, and my brain had been constantly re-healing them for years, the switch doesn't just turn off once I quit peeling them. The brain takes time to recognize and respond to the new environment you have put the lips into. That is very little trauma since you are peeling or rubbing the skin off anymore. Only time can cause the brain to realize that there is no longer a need to send the healing signal to the lips anymore, it's something it has to figure out on its own.

The last and final reason is programmed cell death. After a part of the lip has built up, it causes pressure on the cells directly next to it to be moved around and outside of what they are supposed to be in. Once this happens the brain realizes the cells are no longer where they are supposed to be and aren't able to perform their function and are then programmed to die. You'll notice then when leaving them dry and you take clippers to the very end of it and clip off the dead piece of skin, several hours later there will be more dead skin able to come off because of this (which the same area before clipping had been pink and normal looking). Once this happens the cells underneath have to become the outer layer, when they weren't really ready to become...thus speeding up the reproduction cycle, and causing you more time to heal...

These are the things I have come up with and seem very logically fit to understanding what this is and how to fix it. The key component is figuring out what is causing the lips to become dry in the first place, and then healing them. Whether or not you can use a lotion product to unswell the lips hasn't been tested fully so I don't know. I do know that as long as you don't cause trauma to the lips they will heal eventually.

Great news, Daniel. Yeah, I think telling people close to me helped at the time to get over some social anxieties, but now that my condition isn't so noticeable, I don't bother mentioning it unless someone asks why I'm so health conscious and getting tested or dieting or whatever it might be. In the past couple years, I think only a few people have asked. I appreciated reading your thoughts, but the high prevalence of Accutane-induced peeling lips takes away from your trauma theory . . . I think there is another connection there, perhaps just an overactive immune response to the Vitamin A toxicosis. Also, I'm wondering if it's the brain necessarily causing the incorrect signalling or if it's rather signals in the immune response and skin cell production, the cytokines and keratinocytes. If you leave the skin on to fight programmed cell death, the Catch-22 of course is when bacteria and fungi feed on dead skin it awakens an immune response, which attempts to shed the compromised cells.

Yeah jsl123, I'd say the number of people posting here and contributing has sadly stayed constant at about 20 per week on average. And there's probably 300-400 people checking the site somewhat regularly, with over 10,000 interested people out there if you look at some of the old posts, even taking into account obsessive page edits and refreshes (I'm guilty here). It truly would be great to have an efficient way to compare symptoms and case histories among this larger sample of the population (which may be 1,000,000 for all we know), and record successes and failures, so that we might divide and conquer our conditions better. I think a major division would be people with inflammation and people without significant inflammation, and people who developed the condition after trauma/biting/picking versus it coming out of nowhere/ or as a reaction to Accutane.

Even though I don't have noticeable inflammation, I'm trying out a treatment that is natural, non-steroidal and anti-inflammatory, calendula-infused avocado oil mixed with 0.07% methylcobalamin (a bio-available form of Vitamin B-12). It's a variation on a common plaque Psoriasis treatment, which usually comes in cream form. My version is not on store shelves, though -- I'm making it. Of course, I'll let y'all know if it helps at all in the next couple weeks or if it irritates my lips in any way (it can cause allergic reactions, so I'll be sure to start small).

Peace,
C.S.