What changes in your thirties is not so much the hands themselves as what is asked of them. Responsibilities at work grow, cooking and laundry multiply at home, and if there are small children the number of hand washes in a day rises sharply. The hands carry the same skin they had at twenty-five and do two or three times the work.
The result is dryness that settles in. Roughness that used to recover overnight is still there in the morning. The knuckles turn pale and flaky. Without anyone quite deciding it, chapped hands become part of the ordinary scenery of the day.
In this second article in our series on hand beauty by decade, we look at the two burdens that increase most in the thirties, water and friction, and at a form of care that can survive a busy life.
What increases: water and friction
Consider a day in one's thirties from the hands' point of view. Bottles or lunch boxes washed before leaving the house. Sanitiser on the way to work. A full day of keyboards and phones, fingertips brushing the edges of paper. Hands washed on returning home, dinner cooked, dishes cleared, and then hands washed again alongside a child.
Each action is small. But washing and wet work rinse away the sebum film, alcohol draws out water, and friction against paper and cloth wears at the surface of the skin. The back of the hand has little sebum and thin skin, so these burdens show there quickly as dryness.
Children add a rhythm of their own. Hands are washed before every meal and after every outing, often with a soap chosen for small hands rather than one's own, and dried hurriedly on whatever towel is nearest. Nappies, baths, a table wiped three times a day: parenthood is, among other things, a great deal of water.
In the twenties, the hands mostly contended with sunlight and seasonal dryness. What the thirties add is frequency: more than ten washes a day and friction beyond counting. The kind of burden has changed while the form of care has not, and that gap lies behind much of the chapping in this decade.
When dryness settles in
Healthy skin on the hands recovers the moisture it loses in washing, given time. When the intervals between washes shorten, the next wash arrives before recovery is complete. The balance between the water held in the outer layer of the skin and the sebum film that covers it stays disturbed through the day, and the same thing happens again tomorrow. That is what it means for dryness to settle in.
The answer is not to wash less; washing for hygiene cannot be cut. What can change is the half minute after each wash. Adding moisture as soon as the hands are dry, as many times as they are washed, is the one move within reach. Soie speaks of "wash, then moisturise" as a single habit, and it applies to this decade more than to any other.
Practical ways to protect hands that do a great deal of wet work are gathered in protecting the hands from wet work. Here, the focus is on building frequency into the life of the thirties.
Daytime: light moisture, often
The usual reason hand care lapses during the day is that, once something is applied, nothing can be touched. Hands coated in a rich cream are awkward on a keyboard, on a child's clothing, on a phone. So application is postponed, and the hands go without until night.
What suits the daytime is a light formulation built on water and beauty ingredients that sinks in at once. A beauty serum for the hands is the clearest example: apply it and go straight back to work. One or two pearl-sized drops on the back of the hand, palms brought together, the serum spread between the fingers and around the nails. Thirty seconds at most.
Sanitiser deserves a note of its own. When there is no visible dirt, a sanitiser containing moisturising ingredients is considered less likely to chap the hands than repeated washing with soap and running water. Either way, moisturise once the hands are dry; a serum is light enough that doing so after every use does not get in the way.
The secret to keeping it up is placement. One bottle at the kitchen window, one on the desk, one in the inner pocket of the bag. When a bottle waits wherever the hands are washed and wherever they are used, the step of going to fetch it disappears, and the number of applications rises on its own.
Night, and gloves
With the day carried by frequency, the evening can carry a little more. Smooth the serum into clean hands after the bath and, on very dry days, layer a hand cream of your choice over it. The order is serum first, since it is built on water, and cream after, since it holds off dryness with oil.
Gloves are a considerable help in this decade. Hot water and detergent strip the sebum film during washing-up and bathroom cleaning, and a pair of gloves changes the burden entirely. On nights when the hands are badly chapped, moisturising and then sleeping in cotton gloves is one option; put them on only when the hands are completely dry, and prefer powder-free gloves to limit irritation.
Sunlight should not be forgotten either. On the school run and at the shops, the backs of the hands catch more sun than one would guess. Each morning, extend the sunscreen used on the face to the backs of the hands, and reapply on days spent outdoors. Most spots on the backs of the hands are attributed to UV light, and daily reapplication is the basis of prevention.
What Soie proposes for hands in their thirties
Soie's Enlight Hand Serum is a beauty serum designed only for the hands. It combines EGF and KGF (skin-conditioning ingredients) with five ceramides and peptides (moisturising ingredients), and its light texture leaves no stickiness, so it can be used after every wash without interrupting work or housework. The 30 mL bottle fits a kitchen shelf, a desk or a bag.
Hand beauty in the thirties is less about adding something special than about attaching one small move to actions already there. Wash, then moisturise. The hands have another decade of work ahead of them; give them those thirty seconds.
