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My wife stopped kissing me on the mouth in 2020. She never wanted to explain why. It took me five years to understand. I'm not a doctor. I'm a 61-year-old retired engineer from Bristol. My wife Margaret is 59. We've been married for thirty-six years. I'm only writing this because I think a lot of husbands don't realise what is happening to their wives after fifty. They think it's "just lipstick." They think it's vanity, or makeup, or some small superficial thing women fuss about. They have no idea what their wives are quietly losing every year after the menopause. It started in 2018 when Margaret turned 52. The menopause hit her hard. She had hot flushes, terrible joint pain, two years of insomnia. The HRT helped most of it. But there was one thing the HRT did not help. Her lips. The corners of her mouth started cracking. Not occasionally — every single morning. She'd wake up with split corners that bled when she yawned. The pink colour she'd had all her life slowly drained out. Her lips went pale and thin. Cold sores appeared every few months. The skin felt papery to her, she said. She started keeping a tub of Vaseline on every bedside table, every desk, in the glove compartment of the car, in every handbag she owned. She had been a primary school teacher for thirty-four years. She had stood in front of children every single morning since 1985 wearing a soft warm rose lipstick — the same one her own mother had worn. She told me once, around 2015, that the children in her class always smiled back when she smiled at them. By 2020 she had stopped wearing the lipstick entirely. It hurt her lips, she said. The colour bled into the cracks. It dried her out further. She told me she would "let her mouth heal" and then come back to it. She never came back to it. She also, that same year, stopped kissing me on the mouth. She still kissed my cheek when I left for work. She still kissed the top of my head when I fell asleep on the sofa. She still kissed me goodnight when we went to bed. But she would not kiss me on the mouth. I asked her about it once, in late 2020, after a glass of wine on our anniversary. She said: "Tom. My mouth hurts. The corners split when I open it for anything. I don't want to share that with you." I made the mistake of telling her it didn't matter. I said: "Margaret. Nobody minds a cracked corner." She looked at me for a long moment. She said: "I mind." She kept saying: "It's just dry skin." "It's just the menopause." "It's not that bad." I let her tell me those things. I should have noticed sooner. Until the moment two years ago, when our daughter got married. Margaret was the mother of the bride. She had bought a beautiful soft cream silk dress. She had had her hair done at a small salon in Clifton. She had practised her speech for three weeks. The morning of the wedding, she stood in front of our bathroom mirror trying to apply a small soft pink lipstick she had bought specially. The lipstick bled immediately into the small dry vertical lines around her mouth. The corners cracked when she pressed her lips together. A small amount of blood appeared at the left corner. She sat down on the edge of our bath. She did not cry. She said: "I can't go like this. Look at my mouth. I can't go to our daughter's wedding looking like this." I knelt down on the tiles in front of her in my morning suit and said the wrong thing. I said: "Margaret. Nobody will be looking at your lips." She looked at me for a long moment. She said: "I will." She went to the wedding without lipstick. She gave her speech with her bare cracked mouth. There is a photograph from that day — our daughter and her new husband on the steps of the small Gloucestershire church, Margaret behind them, her mouth held in a small composed line, the corners visibly slightly raw. I keep that photograph in my desk drawer. I have not framed it. I do not know what to do with it. After the wedding the GP referred her to dermatology. The dermatologist was kind. She prescribed a high-strength medical-grade lip balm at £42 per tube on private prescription. Three tubes. £126. I held out hope for two weeks. Then her lips were the same. She tried everything. Eucerin Aquaphor at £28 per tube. Burt's Bees medicated. Carmex original. La Roche-Posay Cicaplast. Avène Cold Cream lip balm. £400 in total over four months. None of them lasted past lunchtime. Some of them stung. One gave her a small rash on her chin. The dermatologist suggested an oestrogen cream specifically formulated for the vermilion border of the lips — a French preparation she had to order on private prescription from a chemist in Switzerland. £180 for one tube. It helped a little. Margaret cried at our kitchen table when she calculated what it would cost per year. £2,160. She tried collagen supplements at £58 a month. She tried hyaluronic acid drops. She tried a small acupuncturist in Bath who specialised in "menopausal facial conditions." She tried a homeopath in Wells. She tried a £290 LED light therapy mask off Instagram. Nothing worked. By summer last year, she had stopped wearing lipstick entirely. She had stopped putting on perfume. She had stopped wearing the small gold earrings I had bought her for our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She had stopped going to the church coffee morning she had organised for fifteen years. She had stopped meeting her oldest friend Helen for lunch on the first Friday of every month — a tradition the two of them had kept since 1985. I asked her in October why she had stopped seeing Helen. She said: "Helen gets photographed at every village event. I don't want to be in those photographs any more." I stood in our kitchen and did not know what to say to my own wife. In December I came home from a long day in London and found her in our bedroom, sitting on the edge of our bed, holding her old wedding photograph from 1988. She was looking at the young 23-year-old face of herself in the photograph — bright, alive, her young mouth open in a real laugh, the warm coral lipstick she had been wearing on her wedding day clearly visible. She did not hear me come in. I stood in the bedroom doorway and watched her for about a minute. She did not move. Then I heard her say, very quietly, to no one in particular: "I haven't kissed my own husband on the mouth in four years." I closed the bedroom door very gently and went downstairs and made her a cup of tea and did not tell her I had heard. That night was the night I started looking for a way to fix this. I'm not a person who buys things online. I am the engineer in our marriage. I read product specifications. I check independent reviews. I read the small print. I had spent close to £900 on dermatology tubes for my wife over four years and watched none of them work. But three weeks later, in early January, something happened. I had to travel to Edinburgh for a small consultancy project I had taken on after retirement. I was staying at a small private members' club on Charlotte Square that the company had booked. I had been there for two nights. On the third morning, I had to leave early for a meeting and had picked up a small toiletries pouch I assumed had been left by the previous guest on the small marble shelf in the bathroom. I was about to hand it in at reception when I opened it to check there was nothing personal inside. There was a small folded note in elegant feminine handwriting, on hotel stationery, that said: *"For the next guest. The lipstick is called Kivora. I have left this tube for whichever woman stays in this room next. It changed my mouth at sixty-three. — Helen, January 2025."* I sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the note. The tube in the small pouch was unopened. Clear acrylic. Almost nothing inside it — just a small transparent gel-like substance. No visible colour. I asked the hotel manager about it at checkout. She was a Scottish woman in her mid-fifties with a soft warm coral mouth. She smiled when I described what I had found. She said: "Sir. About forty per cent of the women over fifty who stay at this hotel ask me about the lipstick at the end of their stay. Some of them, after I tell them, leave a tube in the room for the next woman who stays. It's been happening for about a year and a half. It has hyaluronic acid and squalane in it. It reacts to the wearer's own pH. It heals the lip barrier. It does not bleed. Two of the dermatologists I know in Edinburgh have started recommending it before they recommend their own prescription tubes. You can order it directly from the company's website. They have a buy-one-get-one-free offer on at the moment. I cannot sell it at the hotel. But please tell your wife about it." I bought two tubes from the company website in the back of an Uber to Waverley Station. They arrived four days later in a small cardboard box. I gave the box to Margaret on a Tuesday evening at our kitchen table after dinner. I told her about Edinburgh, about the small toiletries pouch, about the handwritten note from a woman called Helen, about the hotel manager with the warm coral mouth. Margaret opened the box. She lifted out one of the small gold tubes. She said: "Tom. We have spent close to a thousand pounds on this. You cannot keep buying me things that don't work." I said: "Margaret. The hotel manager told me there is a 90-day money-back guarantee. If it doesn't work, we send it back. We lose nothing." She put it on standing at our bathroom mirror that night. For about eight seconds, nothing. Then, slowly, a colour started to come up — not pink, not coral, not red, just a soft warm rose shade that looked like her own mouth if her own mouth had been thirty-two instead of fifty-nine. The colour came up from inside her lips, not from on top of them. She stood in front of the mirror for about three minutes. I heard her say, quietly, to her own reflection: "Oh." She did not say anything else. She came to bed half an hour later. She did not mention the lipstick. She turned out her bedside light and we both lay in the dark for a long time. At about half past eleven she said, very quietly, into the dark: "Tom. My lips don't hurt." That was four months ago. Four months. She has worn it every single morning. The cracks at the corners of her mouth healed within ten days. The cold sores that used to appear every six weeks have not returned. The papery feeling she had described for four years is gone. The colour stays from breakfast through to bedtime — through coffee, through soup, through the small kisses she has started giving me again on the cheek before I leave the house. Two weeks ago she went back to the village church coffee morning she had stopped attending in October. She came home and told me three of the women had asked her what she was wearing on her mouth. One of them was Helen — her own oldest friend — who had been wearing Kivora herself for six months without telling Margaret, because Helen had not wanted to be the woman who pushed Margaret into trying something else after the £900 of dermatology tubes that had not worked. Last Friday Margaret had Helen round for lunch on the first Friday of the month for the first time in seven months. I came home at six and found them at the kitchen table laughing about something neither of them was willing to tell me. Both of them with the same warm rose colour on their mouths. Helen left at half past six. Margaret walked her to the front door. I watched from the kitchen window as the two of them kissed each other on both cheeks the way they had kissed since 1985. Margaret came back into the kitchen. She did not say anything. She came over to me at the kitchen sink and put her arms around me from behind. She rested her forehead against the back of my shoulder. Then she turned me around to face her. And she kissed me on the mouth. For the first time in five years. She did not say anything. She walked away from me to put the kettle on. I stood at the kitchen sink with my hands still wet from the washing up and did not move for about a minute. Last weekend our daughter and her husband came to Sunday lunch with their small one-year-old. Our daughter took a photograph of Margaret holding our granddaughter on the front step of our house. Margaret was laughing. Her mouth was open. The warm rose colour was clearly visible. Our daughter texted the photograph to me on Sunday evening with the message: *"Dad. Mum's mouth in this photograph looks like Mum's mouth at my wedding looks like it should have looked. What is she doing differently? Whatever it is, please thank her for me."* I have not framed the new photograph yet. I have put it on the kitchen dresser. Beside it I have put the wedding photograph from her own wedding speech — the one with her cracked mouth. I have put them side by side so I can see them every morning when I make coffee. Margaret has not noticed yet that I have done this. If you are reading this and you are a husband — if your wife has been quietly disappearing from photographs for years, if she has stopped wearing lipstick, if she has stopped going to the events she used to organise, if she has stopped kissing you on the mouth and you have told yourself it doesn't matter — If you are reading this and you are a wife — if you have spent hundreds of pounds on tubes that did not work, if you have stopped meeting your oldest friend for lunch because you do not want to be photographed at the table — Please do not wait the way we waited. Kivora is buy one get one free this week. Two tubes for £24.99. The promotion closes Sunday at midnight. They do a 90-day money-back guarantee — they take it back even if you have used the whole tube. If it doesn't work for your wife, you send it back, you lose nothing. No questions asked. Just please make sure you only order from the official website. I have seen counterfeits on Amazon and eBay that look almost identical but are cheap fakes that do not work. A friend of mine in Bath bought a copy off Amazon for her sister's birthday — it was a different formula entirely, it dried her sister's lips out worse than before, and the company would not refund her because it had been bought through a third party. The proper site has the "90-day money-back guarantee" badge at the bottom. If you can still see the "Find out more" button below this page, the promotion is still running. The link is here. 👉 https://trykivora.co/products/kivora-signature-lipstick-copie?utm_source=copyToPasteBoard&utm_medium=product-links&utm_content=web P.S. — If you are still unsure: I spent close to £900 on dermatology tubes over four years that did nothing. The first two Kivora tubes cost me £24.99 with the buy-one-get-one. That was four months ago. My wife has not asked me to order anything else since. She kissed me on the mouth last Friday for the first time in five years. Do not wait four years the way we did. The official site with the discount is here: 👉 https://trykivora.co/products/kivora-signature-lipstick-copie?utm_source=copyToPasteBoard&utm_medium=product-links&utm_content=web