About eight months ago I was driving back from a press trip, slightly dehydrated as I usually am after a night away on a work jolly - it being one of the only times I will have more than a couple of glasses of booze - and I caught sight of the tops of my hands as they rested on the steering wheel.
Reader, I almost veered from the road such was my surprise at the state of them. It was as though I’d set eyes upon the desiccated hands of a mummified pharaoh. So crackly and dry, they were the sort of thing that might have spontaneously combusted during a hosepipe ban.
How had this happened? How had they slid into this semi-reptilian state of existence? My own hands seemingly swapped out with the hands of a ninety-year-old Victorian washerwoman? Who apparently spent her brief breaks from the workhouse sitting outside in direct, intense sunlight wearing a generous coating of baby oil on any exposed areas of skin?
Not that baby oil even was around in the Victorian times. Also, unlikely a Victorian washerwoman would have made it to ninety, what with the diabolical living conditions and rampant cholera and typhus, and the slow and painful poisoning from the lye fumes in the workhouse, but I AM JUST TRYING TO GET ACROSS THE POINT THAT MY HANDS WERE CRACKLY AND WRINKLY AND DRY, ALL RIGHT?
I’m trying to bring the story alive for you! Do we really need historical accuracy for this fleeting visual?
Anyway back to my hands, that were dry as pork scratchings: they had crept up on me, these hands. All the time I’d been lavishing my attention on my face, oiling it and massaging it and micro-currenting it and bathing it in near-infrared light, my hands had been sat there observing it all in sheer disbelief, agog at the level of blatant inequality going on.
I think that’s probably what’s been happening, at any rate. That and, y’know, getting older. And I’ve never been big on hand cream - never been the sort to have a spare tube of it in my handbag, to perch a pot of it upon my desk so that I remember to apply at regular intervals - at best, I do a bit of dedicated hand maintenance once a fortnight and then, every other day or so, I apply a bit of whatever moisturiser has gone onto my face onto the backs of my hands as well.
Which brings me onto my very important revelation.
Why, I thought to myself as I drove back from the aforementioned press trip, staring at hands that looked as though they’d been unearthed from the tomb of Ramesses, do we pull out all the high-potency skincare big guns for our faces, but then buy what amounts to bog-standard moisturising creams for our hands? With some pretty scent thrown in?
And why are we so surprised when our faces look smooth and glowing and our hands, by comparison, look like ancient mosaics?
(This is making it sound as though I’m continuously preoccupied with both my hands and face - I’m not. I mean, I test stuff and appraise it and then recommend the good bits to other people as part of my living, but I don’t spend all day obsessing over my skin, face or otherwise. I’m not trying to hold back the tide of time. At least, I’m not trying very hard, over and above good skincare and a couple of at-home beauty tech devices. I don’t want needles or sperm injections, I don’t want threads pulled through my face and I don’t want to be given third degree burns in a clinic so that my skin “repairs itself”: I just want simple products and processes that I can do myself and that keep me looking a bit fresher, a bit more radiant and a bit less “medieval turnip”.)
I tried to recall whether I even owned any high-potency skincare treatments for my hands. Whether any high-potency skincare treatments for hands even existed! And this is when I had my most important realisation:
that I already owned the most potent thing I could possibly own to treat the skin on the backs of my hands, and that I was already using it. On my face!
Once I’d had this almost religious moment of epiphany (which coincided with an eighteen-wheeler lorry pulling out in front of me without indicating on the M5, so it could have very well been one of my last thoughts) I actually couldn’t believe that I hadn’t been bunging the potent product in question on the backs of my hands already.
Because when I tell you that this routine - doing the backs of my hands with the same thing I do my face with - has somehow magically turned back the hand-skin clock, it is with no word of exaggeration.
The backs of my hands have gone from looking like they’re made from tree bark to being nicely smooth, beautifully soft, and - dare I say it? - radiant hands, all in the space of around eight months. And I didn’t even have to buy anything new, is the absolute beauty of it all…
