Cold sores aka HSV-1
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The lips get a film of saliva on them from the mouth. The saliva conducts heat out from the pores in the skin out to the air. And the saliva even evaporates taking the heat energy away from your skin. And it does not help that you get airflow from your nose or mouth to carry the moist hot air away from your lips.
The virus doesn’t really move around a lot once you contract it. It embeds itself in your nerve cells and causes the cold sores to form when… things trigger it. We’re still not 100% clear on what makes the episodes happen, but we’ve narrowed it down to a big list of triggers.
So if you got it from, say, a family member’s kiss, you came into contact with their virus via your lips. Maybe your lips were chapped or cracked, that was how the virus got in. You’ll keep having the cold sore where it got in because it stays in nerve tissue rather than moving around in blood cells.
Since it’s usually transferred via mouth-based things, it’s most likely to get in through the lips. We don’t typically have a lot of open wounds *inside* of our mouths and it seems to take contact with body fluids to “get in”.
So put another way: this isn’t a virus that’s very good at moving around your body. If it doesn’t get through your skin fairly close to something it can “live” inside, it isn’t going to last. Your lips are a place very likely to come in contact with it *and* happen to have the kind of tissue it wants. Other parts of your body not so much.
All viruses have the ability to infect certain kinds of cells with some specificity. For example, HIV infects a specific type of white blood cell called a CD4 T-cell. Herpes viruses infect skin and nerve cells. They can infect different parts of the skin depending on what part gets exposed to the virus. The lips and genitals happen to be common locations of exposure. HSV1 and HSV2 can both infect both sites, they are not exclusive to one site or the other. In addition, herpes can cause meningitis if it manages to travel along the nerves up to the brain (usually this only happens in patients with immune compromise). Look up “herpetic whitlow;” nurses commonly get herpes lesions on their fingers from taking care of sick patients who transmit the virus.
In between outbreaks of blisters, the dormant virus actually resides in nerve cells, specifically dorsal root ganglia.
More broadly, many viruses target mucous membranes. Your lips, parts of your genitals, your eyes are all mucous membranes.
HSV-1 is unusual because it only flares up at the original site of infection and even if you are re-infected with the virus, the original site is usually what flares up.
Thus lips and less commonly, genitals, are where the initial site of infection is because of human behavior: kissing, oral sex, genital to genital sex. It would be interesting to know if HSV-1 can infect the eyes or, say, mucous membranes of the respiratory system, but human behavior rarely has lips touching those things.
(If you are having a HSV-1 flare up, still avoid contact if possible. While the original infection site usually flares up, there’s some slight risk of complications with re-infection.)
As a person who’s had some really bad reactions in the past, trust me, they can migrate to other parts of your face. I once had a spread that covered my nose, mouth and chin. 10/10 would not recommend.
You can actually get herpes sores anywhere on your body provided that is the spot it went in. I know someone with genital and she has it on her vag and on her upper leg. The thing is herpes needs an entry point and the lips and the genital tissue makes an easier entry point so you commonly see them there. Your arm for example could get herpes there but it would take a bit more abrasion there to create the entry point as the skin there is tougher. The virus comes back at the point of entry as it moves through the nerves where it went in, then travels back to that location in an outbreak.
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