Asked what makes the hands rough in winter, most people would say the cold air outside. Yet in the course of a day the hands are out in that air for perhaps an hour; the rest of the time they are in heated rooms. The place where the hands dry out is, in fact, indoors.
Heating warms the air but adds no water to it. Warmed air is relatively dry and draws moisture from everything in the room: the soil in the plant pots, the wooden furniture, the surface of the hands. Before the heating season begins, it is worth setting out hand care for the indoors, room by room.
What happens to the hands in a heated room
The back of the hand has few sebaceous glands, and the film of sebum that holds water in the outer layer of the skin is thin to begin with. In dry air, water keeps evaporating from the skin's surface, and the sebum film cannot hold it back. Add the washes that happen indoors, and the film is rinsed away, leaving the dry air to do the rest.
The difference from the cold outdoors is that none of this is noticed. In a cold wind the hands feel dry; in a warm room they feel comfortable, and the drying goes unremarked. By the time the back of the hand feels tight when it bends, in the late afternoon, several hours of drying have already passed.
Dry air is hardest of all on wet hands. The few droplets left after washing and drying evaporate within seconds in a heated room, taking moisture from the outer layer of the skin as they go. This is why, indoors in winter, the gap between drying the hands and applying the serum should be as short as it can be.
At home: the warm air and the tap
At home there are two adjustments. First, do not sit for long where the warm air blows directly onto the hands. If the usual place on the sofa faces the vent, a small shift changes how fast the skin loses water. Second, humidity. Keep a hygrometer, and when the room feels dry, add moisture with a humidifier or by drying laundry indoors. This is as much for the face and the throat as for the hands.
Then increase the number of applications. Indoors in winter, even with longer gaps between washes than in summer, the hands dry faster than they do in summer. Apply not only after washing but whenever the back of the hand feels tight. A bottle of serum within reach in the kitchen, the bathroom and the living room raises the count without any effort.
At work: the vent overhead and the seat by the window
Offices are heated more strongly than homes, and the humidity is not yours to adjust. The desk directly under a ceiling vent, or the heated seat by the window, is the driest environment the hands meet all day. Even if the seat cannot be changed, a bottle on the desk means the serum can go on the moment the hands feel dry.
For the office, the conditions are a texture that leaves no stickiness, so that the keyboard can be touched straight afterwards, and a scent that does not reach the next desk. The wash before lunch, the return from a meeting, the tight feeling across the back of the hand in mid-afternoon. Three or four times a day, thirty seconds each, and the hands are different by evening.
Working from home combines the conditions of both places. The heating can be adjusted, but the hands are washed less often, the chair is left less often, and the same stream of warm air falls on the same hands for hours. Stand up once an hour for a glass of water and touch the back of the hand while you are at it. That alone brings forward the moment at which the dryness is noticed.
Hot drinks, and the moment the gloves come off
Two moments are easily overlooked. One is holding a hot cup for a long time. Behind the comfort of warm palms, the skin in contact with the cup is being heated and losing water. The other is the moment of taking the gloves off on coming in from outside. When cold hands warm suddenly in a heated room, surface moisture evaporates all at once.
Neither involves washing the hands, so the cue to apply is easily missed. Make after a hot drink and after the gloves come off cues of the same standing as a wash. The more cues there are, the higher the count rises without any act of will. The whole order of washing, moisturising and protecting is on our hand care page.
How Soie sees it
Soie's Enlight Hand Serum is a beauty serum for the hands designed to leave no stickiness and to be reapplied as many times a day as needed. Five ceramides and peptides (moisturising ingredients) support the moisture of the outer layer of the skin, and EGF and KGF (skin-conditioning ingredients) keep the skin of the hands healthy. With one 30 mL bottle at home and another at work, reapplying through the heating season stops being something to remember and becomes something in view.
At night, the hands rest in a bedroom where the heating is off. Two drops of serum before bed, worked into the knuckles and the nail contours, turn the only hours of the day without warm air into the hands' time to recover. On the driest nights a cream can go over the top.
What dries the hands in winter is warmth rather than cold. Decide the places and the cues before the heating goes on, and this winter's hands will reach the spring with a different feel.
