About Hand Care

They say a palmist can say a lot about you by reading your palms. May be true, may be not. However, a look at anybody’s hands for sure can tell a lot about the person. If the face is the index of your mind, your hands are the index of your health and youthfulness.

The hands are the most used part of the body, day in and day out. Right from brushing your teeth, to writing or punching away on the key board or from playing a guitar to gardening and cooking – hands are in use.

More often than not, while the face is still attempted to be taken care of, many ignore the hands considering the wear and tear that it undergoes as something just ‘normal’. Or, dismissed woefully with‘what can be done after all’ rhetoric and a sigh. And the result? Your hands end up sporting a skin that looks dry or shriveled and even wrinkled at an age far in advance of time causing you to proffer some excuse or make you feel embarrassed.

You might not have realized that your hands are not possible to be kept covered at all points of time nor can you perform all tasks in life by wearing gloves. The hands and of course, the skin get exposed to the environment – water, dust and dirt, sun rays, cold breeze, sweat while working, steam arising from cooking, touching and handling many a thing rough, hard or even hot, minor abrasions suffered from brushing against something, pressures applied by or on the hands…….all of these and more surely take a toll on the skin of your hands. And you don’t realize it. Mostly because these happen in a routine fashion while doing normal mundane tasks and therefore escapes special attention.

There are many ways to take care of the hands. The skin on your hands is very delicate and thin. Apart from taking some precautionary steps to prevent obvious damage to the hands and the skin (like wearing gloves while doing certain tasks and avoiding the use of normal soap as far as possible), you will need to pay special attention to managing the skin.

Like the skin on any other part of your body, the skin on your hand needs exfoliation at regular intervals. This helps remove the top layer of dead cells and enables the new skin to surface which make your hands sport fresh and younger looking skin. The skin of the hands as well as the cuticles below your nails needs moisturizing regularly. And every time the sun rays kiss your hands like when are you are driving or gardening, the skin gets affected and starts to age faster and wrinkle. Using a sun screen lotion will help prevent this damage.

The perceived trouble of taking care of your hands probably deters you from starting to take basic care at all. However, the process isn’t as cumbersome as you may think.