Your Signal
Chilblains
10 min read
Also known as: perniosis · cold damage to the skin · blue fingers from cold · red swellings from cold · cold nodules · winter bumps · frostbite blisters · cold bumps · swollen fingers in cold · perniones · itching cold spots
Your Body Is Speaking
It begins with an itch. Then comes the burning. The skin on your fingers, toes, sometimes ears or nose, turns reddish-blue, swells, becomes hard, and feels both numb and hypersensitive at once. The cold has hit something in you to which your body doesn't just respond with shivering — but with a full-blown inflammation.
Medically speaking, chilblains are a misdirected response of the fine blood vessels beneath the skin. In the cold they contract. When warmth returns, they open only hesitantly, unevenly, in a disturbed way. A congestion forms, a quiet inflammation, a tissue that can be neither properly cold nor properly warm. The circulation is there — but it stalls at the surface, exactly where you touch the world.
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