It is neither. It is your hormones leaving a post in your eyelids nobody told you they held.

They are a three-layer film, and the outermost layer is oil.

That oil comes from meibomian glands in your upper and lower eyelids. It stops your tears evaporating between blinks.

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Estrogen, progesterone and testosterone all regulate the oil those glands secrete.

During perimenopause estrogen and progesterone decline, and testosterone falls gradually with age.

The glands receive a weaker signal and produce less oil, and thicker oil.

Without that layer on top, your tears evaporate faster than your eyes can replace them.

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Wind accelerates it. Air conditioning accelerates it.

Reading and screens make it worse, because you blink less when you concentrate.

Every second between blinks is another second the tear film sits exposed without its shield.

Schaumberg and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital analyzed data from the Women’s Health Study and published in the American Journal of Ophthalmology in 2003.

Prevalence among women over fifty was 7.8 percent, which extrapolates to roughly 3.2 million American women in that age group.

Women develop dry eye at close to double the rate of men, and hormonal contribution is the leading explanation for that gap.

Your eyes are drying for the same reason your skin changed and your sleep broke. The system maintaining moisture across your body is the same one withdrawing from your eyelids.

Most eye examinations treat the dryness without ever asking where you are hormonally.

The link between meibomian glands and sex hormones sits in the research literature and almost never reaches the exam room.

Press a warm washcloth over your closed eyes for eight to ten minutes. Warm enough that you feel the heat through the lids. Re-warm it when it cools.

The heat softens thickened oil inside the glands and lets it release.

This is not a comfort measure. It is maintenance on glands that lost their operating signal.

Look for lipid-based on the label.

Standard artificial tears replace water. Your problem is not water.

If a month of nightly heat has not changed things, ask your optometrist or ophthalmologist to evaluate your meibomian glands, using that word.

Those two words change what they look for and how they look at your lid margins.

Your eyes did not get weaker. The shield they depended on was hormonal, and nobody told you it was leaving.