For as long as I can remember, I’ve dealt with dry, chapped hands. From around November to March every year my hands are exposed to Minnesota’s harsh winter air. And it shows.
With the arrival of winter comes dry air, cold temperatures, and forced-air heat. Add those factors to my already bad habits of washing my hands about twenty times each day, rarely wearing gloves outside, and forgetting to reapply lotion throughout the day and my hands turn from being normal to being covered with painfully dry, cracked, and sometimes bleeding skin.
The best way to treat this would be to prevent my skin from becoming dry in the first place. Having dealt with this issue for practically all my life I know that I should be washing my hands less often than I do, applying lotion every time I wash my hands, wearing gloves when I go outside on cold, windy days, and maybe even putting a humidifier in my house. Instead, for some reason, I choose to strip away my hands’ natural oils until they’re so beat up that they’re painful to move. And then I finally try to do something about it.
I the past, I used the moisturizing version of pretty much every product that my hands came into contact with: hand soap, body wash, hair products, and dish soap. But still my hands would become chapped. I guess it doesn’t matter how well the products moisturize when I offset them by using the hottest water that I can stand and not moisturizing after. I sometimes wear gloves when I do the dishes but that usually ends up with a glass slipping out of my hands and breaking.
I have found one treatment that has worked well for me over the years, though it’s only a short-term solution that needs to be repeated every night. Before I go to bed, I lather my hands with a thick layer of an oil-based moisturizer. Then I put a pair of cotton gloves on and try wear them for as much of the night as possible. I’ve had good luck with my bat-gloves that are pictured above, but I have a feeling that any cotton gloves, or even socks would work. I tend to get annoyed with them and rip them off at some point in the middle of the night, but it still seems to be a pretty effective overnight fix.
If you go through bouts of scaly, dry, itchy, and cracked skin, you may have psoriasis. Check out Jonathan’s article, How to Get Rid of Dry Skin (Psoriasis) to learn more about symptoms and treatments.
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