Her Hot Flashes Had An Explanation. Her Burning Feet Didn’t.

“In 2 years nobody had asked what my feet did after a sweat passed. The nurse practitioner who did put them on the same list as the flashes, and 3 weeks later I was sleeping through to the alarm.”

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

I wake up a minute before it starts now, which is a thing your body learns to do.

It’s usually around 20 past 1.

The heat comes up through my chest and my back and my scalp, and then it breaks.

I know that part. That part has had a name for 2 years.

I push the covers down and wait it out, and it passes, the way it always does.

Then the sheet under me goes cold and damp, I pull the covers back up, and I get about 4 minutes.

And then my feet start.

Not the sweat. My feet.

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.

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

The hot flashes got a name and a plan. My feet got “probably something else.”

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

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

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 the sweats and we’d spent the appointment on them.

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 and I’m on concrete most of the day, and the greenhouse floor is the worst floor 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, as it turns out. I just had no idea how far down it went.

A nurse practitioner asked me what my feet do after a sweat passes.

It was a follow-up in June, and a nurse practitioner named Robin was covering that day.

She went down the list the way they do, then asked me something nobody had asked in 2 years.

She asked what my feet do after a sweat passes.

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 drop that’s doing the flashes doesn’t stop at my chest and my face.

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

The same changes can happen lower down.

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

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

She was in my kitchen before bed doing her feet out of a small grey jar, the way you’d put on hand cream.

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. It came Thursday.

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

I still had a sweat that night, around 1. It did nothing for that and I hadn’t expected it to.

But after the sweat passed, the part that always starts didn’t start.

I slept through to the alarm.

The 4th night went the same way. About the 5th I’m less sure, because 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.

Witch hazel I know, and willow bark I could have worked out.

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 the ones I could have walked over and pointed at in our own greenhouse and got to 6.

There’s menthol on there as well, and peppermint, and that’s where the smell comes from.

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

Robin had said the first few minutes and everything after them are 2 different jobs. Reading the list in order, that’s more or less how it’s written.

The Same Changes Can Happen Lower Down

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

Estrogen isn’t only doing the flashes. It’s also part of what keeps the small blood vessels opening and closing the way they should.

My feet are farthest from my heart and are also at the end of some of the longest nerves in the body, so I started wondering whether they could be affected too.

She explained that a few different things may be going on at the same time.

Blood flow can be different farther down the body, the tissue around the nerve can become irritated, and the nerves themselves can become more sensitive.

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

There are 4 layers of skin between a cream and the part that’s burning, and the burning is at the bottom.

The warmth comes first, and the other parts of the formula are intended to work alongside that initial sensation.

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

If the cause is hormones, and hormones are all the way through me, why would something I rub on my foot matter.

She said the cause and the place are 2 different questions, and the cause is already covered.

The place it landed is 4 inches of skin, blood supply and nerve ending at the far end of me.

The cream isn’t meant to address the hormonal cause. It’s applied directly to the areas where you 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 of those.

I wanted somebody who wasn’t selling me anything to say the connection out loud.

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

The one that stopped me was about women my age: 120 in early menopause, 42 to 55, against 24 who weren’t there yet.

They measured how well the lining of the blood vessels was working, and it was worse in the menopausal women.

What predicted it best wasn’t age or blood pressure. It was how bad the hot flashes were.¹

Another paper separated the menopause part from the birthday part. It was the menopause part.²

The nerve side took longer to find, and I’ll be straight about it.

It was done in rats, in 1994, and it’s the paper that first showed estrogen receptors sitting on the sensory nerve cells themselves.³

So the nerve endings aren’t bystanders. There’s somewhere on them for estrogen to land.

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 What’s in this one is for warmth and for getting blood down there, and the frankincense is in there for the tissue part.⁶

And rubbing it on means it only reaches the nerve endings you put it on, instead of going through the rest of me.⁵

It has done nothing for my hands. My right hand goes numb before I’m properly awake, and I’ve been putting it on 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.