Using hand moisturizer can help keep the skin of your hands healthy and young-looking. These creams and lotions are designed to help your hands retain moisture and to shield your skin from environmental irritants. Beyond these basic properties, however, hand moisturizers vary widely, and choosing the right one for your hands depends on your skin type and the effects you hope to achieve. Moisturizers can treat conditions like excessive dryness, aging, and eczema; some formulas can even target a combination of these.
Frequent exposure to diverse weather conditions and irritants such as dish soaps make hand dryness a common problem; accordingly, many people seek a hand moisturizer that can combat or even prevent dryness. To treat dry hands, you should choose a thick, oil-based moisturizer which will act as a kind of “grout,” filling out small cracks in the skin to restore its smoothness. If you want to inhibit further drying, you might look for a product that contains humectants, substances that draw water from the air and help trap it within the skin. To determine whether a moisturizer contains humectants, you can scan its label. Commonly used humectants to watch for include lactic acids, glycerin, and urea.
Like the rest of the skin, as the outer covering of the hands ages, it can wrinkle, spot, and lose firmness. Some hand moisturizers work to delay or minimize the visual symptoms of aging. Prolonged overexposure to UV rays from the sun or from artificial sources like tanning beds is a common cause of aged skin and, more dangerously, skin cancer. To reduce the chances of developing these conditions, you should choose a hand moisturizer that contains a sunscreen with a sun protection factor (SPF) of 15 or higher and remember to apply it daily.
Many hand moisturizers promise to treat skin that already has a mature appearance. These formulas usually contain a mixture of ingredients that can slough off old layers of skin, stimulate cell growth and plump the skin to reduce the appearance of fine lines, and defuse environmental pollutants that can cause wrinkles. If you would like to treat skin maturity, you might seek a hand moisturizer that contains ingredients like peptides, retinol, or hydroxy acids. It is important to note, however, that the effectiveness of these treatments is not guaranteed, and improvements can reverse when you cease using the product.
If you suffer from a chronic skin condition such as eczema, you might select a hand moisturizer that contains a soothing anti-itch agent like oatmeal or hydrocortisone. In some cases, over-the-counter moisturizers will not be effective in treating irritated hands. Should you find that your hand moisturizer is not alleviating the symptoms of your skin condition, you can consult your dermatologist for advice.
