Menopause Came With A List Of Symptoms. Her Feet Weren’t On It.

“For 2 years, every other symptom had an explanation. My feet were the one thing nobody could explain. Then a nurse practitioner told me the hormonal changes I was going through could also affect my feet. 3 weeks later, I was sleeping through to the alarm.”

Julie K., 53 · Pennsylvania  /  September 3, 2026

I am awake at about 20 past 1 most nights, and it is my feet that do it.

It isn’t a sharp pain. It’s more that the skin on both feet has been left too near something, from the toes back to the middle of the arch.

I put them out from under the covers, which works for a few minutes, and then they’re cold and burning at once, which I didn’t know you could be until I was 51.

There’s a clip fan on my nightstand, pointed at the end of the bed.

My husband moved into the guest room in the spring.

He says it’s the fan and I say it’s the fan.

It is partly the fan.

Menopause has handed me a list since then.

First my sleep changed, then came the hot flashes. I started gaining weight, my joints began hurting in the morning, and I started losing my train of thought.

Every one of those has a name, and somebody whose job it is to deal with it.

2 years of that, and my feet were the only part of it nobody ever put on the list.

I had started to understand what was happening to the rest of my body. My feet were the one thing nobody could explain.

I was 51 when it started, and I went in about the sleep.

That was a good appointment, and I want to say so.

Inside 20 minutes it had a name, I left with a plan, and the plan worked. It’s still working.

Here’s what got handled over the next 2 years, roughly in order.

• The flashes and the night sweats, which my doctor and I sorted out at that first appointment
• A cooling topper for the mattress, $80, worth it
• The fan, and then a second fan for downstairs
• Something for sleep, on and off
• Wine cut back to weekends, which I did not enjoy
• Magnesium at bedtime, because everybody on the internet says magnesium
• Plain lotion on my feet, because it was what was in the drawer

Every one of those was for something somebody had named, and most did the job they were bought for.

My feet are the one line I never got an answer written next to.

I brought them up twice.

The first time I got “that’s probably something else.”

The second time I didn’t push it, because I’d come in about something else and we’d spent the appointment on that.

Nobody did anything wrong there. It just never got written down.

And for most of the first year I thought it was the floor.

I work at a garden center, on concrete most of the day, and the greenhouse floor is the worst I have ever stood on.

There’s a crack in it under the bench where we keep the ferns, and I’ve been stepping over that crack since 2019.

So I bought better shoes, then better shoes again, then insoles.

The shoes helped my knees.

What I never did was buy anything for a nerve.

It didn’t cross my mind, because I never once thought the word.

I thought hormones.

I was right about that, but I had no idea it could affect my feet too.

A nurse practitioner went down the list, then asked about my feet.

It was a follow-up in June, with a nurse practitioner named Robin.

She went down the list. The sleep, the flashes, the joints, the mood.

Then she asked what my feet were doing at night.

In 2 years nobody had asked me about my feet.

I said they burn. I said it the way you mention a separate subject.

She said it isn’t a separate subject.

She said the hormonal changes behind the flashes and sleep problems can affect other parts of the body too.

I typed what she said into my phone in the parking lot.

The same hormone changes can affect my feet.

It had to be for my feet, not the flashes, it had to match what Robin said, and it had to be returnable.

In July my sister came up for a weekend. She’s 58, 5 years ahead of me on this.

She was in my kitchen before bed doing her feet out of a small grey jar. I’d watched her do that before and never asked. This time I did.

The jar had Lune on the lid. I ordered one that night, and it came Thursday.

I did both feet the way she showed me. The warmth came 10 minutes in, and the burning went quiet underneath.

I was still awake at 1. It did nothing for the flashes or the sleep and I hadn’t expected it to.

But my feet didn’t start burning.

I slept through to the alarm.

The 4th night went the same way. About the 5th I’m less sure, I’d had 2 glasses of wine.

I know what most of those plants look like.

I read the back of it properly on the Sunday, in daylight, with my glasses on.

Frankincense was the first thing on the list.

Up to then it was a word out of a Christmas carol.

Then arnica, which my mother kept in a green tube for bruises.

Calendula I know. We sell calendula. It’s a marigold, near enough.

Frankincense · Arnica · Cayenne · Hemp seed oil

Magnesium chloride · Menthol · Peppermint · Camphor · Calendula · Witch hazel · MSM · Willow bark · Glucosamine · Algal omega‑3 · Niacinamide · Panthenol · Vitamin E · Jojoba · Mango seed butter · Arrowroot

I counted 6 I could have pointed at in our own greenhouse.

There’s menthol on there too, and peppermint, and that’s the smell.

The menthol sits a long way down the list, underneath several things I had to look up.

Robin had said the cooling you feel first and the slower work underneath it are 2 different jobs. The list reads more or less that way.

The Same Hormone Changes Can Affect Your Feet

I went back and got Robin to take it slowly. She drew it on a lab slip.

Estrogen isn’t only doing the symptoms with names on them. It also helps keep the small blood vessels working the way they should.

My feet are farthest from my heart, and they’re also at the end of some of the longest nerves in the body. I wondered whether they were affected too.

She explained that a few things may be going on at once.

Blood flow can be different in the feet, the tissue around the nerves can become irritated, and the nerves can become more sensitive.

The lotion in my drawer wasn’t doing any of that.

The cream sits on the surface, while the nerves involved in the sensation are deeper below those layers.

Here’s the part I made her explain to me twice.

If hormones are all through me, why would something I rub on my foot matter.

She said the hormones and my feet were 2 different questions. The hormones were already being handled.

The cream isn’t meant to address the hormonal cause. It is applied directly to the skin on my feet, where I feel the sensation.

It isn’t hormone therapy. I’m still doing everything I was doing before.

1. Scoop. Use about a fingertip’s worth.
2. Rub. Work it into the tops and soles of both feet.
3. Wait. It absorbs in about a minute.

It goes on when I brush my teeth, or I’d forget.

The first week was the warmth, with the burning quieter underneath it. By week 3 I’d stopped putting my feet out from under the covers.

My husband is still in the guest room. That’s the sweats and the fan, and this did nothing for either.

I went looking for somebody with nothing to sell me.

I’m not a scientist. I read on my lunch break for a month.

One study compared 120 women in early menopause, ages 42 to 55, with 24 women who had not reached menopause.

They measured how well the blood vessel lining was working. It was worse in the menopausal women, and what predicted that best wasn’t age or blood pressure but the hot flashes.¹

Another paper found the difference was linked to menopause itself, not just getting older.²

Research on the nerves themselves took longer to find.

It was done in rats, in 1994, and it first showed estrogen receptors on the sensory nerve cells.³

So estrogen affects the nerve endings too, not just the blood vessels around them.

None of those papers is about a jar of cream, and a rat is not me.

The strongest work on cayenne used a prescription patch, at a strength no jar of cream comes near.⁴ The cayenne here is for warmth and blood flow, and the frankincense for the irritated tissue.⁶

And because I rub it in, it works on the nerve endings in my feet, not my whole body.⁵

It has done nothing for my hands. My right hand goes numb before I’m properly awake, and I’ve used it there since August.

Hundreds Of Verified Buyers Report The Burning Easing Off At Night, And A Lot Of Them Are Women

Go on Lune’s own site and you’ll find plenty of people who had been putting up with this at night for years.

More than half the ones I read were women.

Not one of them says the word menopause. They talk about their feet.

Which is about right, because that is exactly how I’d have written mine 2 years ago.