The rainy season has ended and the air outside is thick enough to leave a film on the skin, yet in the office your fingertips feel rough as they turn the pages. Dry hands in summer come with exactly this contradiction. Less painful than winter chapping, the condition often goes unnoticed until autumn.
Most of the cause lies in the air-conditioned rooms where we spend the greater part of the day. Air conditioning cools the air and, at the same time, removes moisture from it. However humid the street may be, the air above your desk can be as dry as a heated room in January.
This article takes the four reasons for summer dryness in turn, then suggests a light daytime moisturising habit that is easy to keep.
One: the low humidity air conditioning creates
An air-conditioned room is far drier than it feels. Cooled air holds less water, and after hours inside it, moisture leaves the surface of the skin quietly and steadily. The back of the hand, with its few sebaceous glands and thin sebum film, feels the effect before the face does.
At a desk, the hands stay all day at the height where the cooled air moves across the surface. The face turns and shifts; the hands on the keyboard remain in nearly the same place, exposed to dry air hour after hour.
The moving air itself hastens the drying. Wherever a draught touches the skin, surface moisture is carried off more quickly. A draught on the face is uncomfortable enough that we move away from it; a draught across the hands on a desk can go unnoticed for a whole afternoon. It is worth checking, once, where the vent is pointing in relation to where your hands rest.
Two: cold fingers and circulation
The temperature, colour and softness of the hands depend on fine blood circulation. Long hours at a computer in a cooled room leave the fingertips cold, and circulation tends to slow. When circulation slows, dullness and dryness are said to progress more easily.
Cold hands also change the impression they give when they touch something. If your hands feel cool and look pale in midsummer, air conditioning is a likely reason. Warming the hands from time to time, moving the fingers, stroking the back of one hand with the other as you smooth in a serum: small gestures like these help restore the rhythm of circulation.
Three and four: evaporating sweat and extra washing
Outdoors you sweat; indoors the air conditioning evaporates that sweat almost at once. As sweat evaporates it takes surface moisture with it. A summer day spent going in and out of buildings is, for the hands, a day of getting wet and drying out over and over.
Summer also brings more hand washing: after wiping away sweat, after holding a cold drink, after coming back inside. Each wash removes some of the sebum film and upsets the balance of water and lipids in the stratum corneum. When there is no visible dirt, a sanitiser with moisturising ingredients is considered gentler on the skin than repeated washing, but in either case the key is to moisturise once the hands are dry.
The habit of light daytime moisturising
Few people want to apply a heavy cream to dry summer hands. Not wishing to touch documents or a phone with sticky fingers is a perfectly reasonable feeling. That is precisely why summer calls for moisturising that leaves nothing on the surface.
A hand serum built on water and beauty ingredients sinks in without leaving a film. After washing, when the hands feel dry in the cooled air, at a natural pause in the afternoon: a few light applications a day from the back of the hand to the fingertips are enough to help summer hands feel settled again.
The most natural moment to moisturise is immediately after washing. That is when water is most readily lost from the skin, and replenishing moisture then carries the hands calmly through the hours until the next wash. When washing and moisturising are joined into a single movement, there is no longer any need to count how often you have done it.
- Keep a small bottle on the desk and reach for it after washing.
- If the vent blows directly onto your hands, redirect it slightly.
- Back indoors after sweating, wash in lukewarm water, pat dry and moisturise at once.
- In the evening, give the hands a serum in the same sequence as your facial skincare.
Soie's approach
Soie (pronounced swah; French for silk) designed Enlight Hand Serum to melt into the skin the moment it touches the fingertips, so that a keyboard or a phone can be used immediately afterwards. The 30 mL bottle is sized for a desk or a bag and suits daytime use in summer as it is. Its five ceramides and peptides (moisturising ingredients) give moisture back to hands dried by air conditioning.
Hand beauty does not change its fundamentals with the season. The order of wash, then moisturise, stays the same all year. In summer you add daytime sun protection, and in periods of frequent washing you use the serum more often. With only that adjustment, the same habit carries through summer and winter alike, which is what makes it a habit rather than a project.
Common questions about dry hands are answered in the hand beauty Q&A, and the different roles of serum and cream are discussed in another article in this journal.
Summer dryness is easy to overlook because it does not hurt the way winter dryness does. Yet the months spent in air conditioning amount, for the hands, to a long dry season. The air outside is damp; the hands are dry. The afternoon you notice this is the afternoon summer hand care can begin.
