Best Hand Creams for Hands That Age First

One finds, in this century, that a great deal of attention is paid to the face, and almost none to the hands, which is precisely backward. The face is presented. The hands are used — washed a dozen times a day, held under water hotter than any water I knew, put into gloves that are not really gloves and then taken out again into the cold — and so it is the hands that go first. The dermatologists say the skin on the back of the hand is thinner and has fewer oil glands than the face; I say I have watched two centuries of women fold their hands in their laps in the rooms I happen to occupy, and it is always the hands one notices before the face. My doctor in 1819 had no opinion on this. He had opinions on a great many things, few of them correct, but hands were beneath his notice, and mine — being at that point beyond repair by any cream — were beneath it too.

I have not, you understand, any use for these products myself. What I have is the correspondence. The reviews arrive in their hundreds, and I read every one, the way letters were once read: for what the writer says, and then for what the writer does not say. From those, and from the dermatologists who are consulted by the modern magazines and who agree with one another more than doctors did in my day, four creams stand apart. They are not the most elaborate. The elaborate ones — with their retinols and their peptides and their eighty-dollar tubes — have their admirers, and I wish them well. These four are the ones the living actually keep by the sink.

The first is for hands that are cracked — the word the reviewers use, and they mean it literally — and it is O’Keeffe’s Working Hands, a jar so plain it seems almost to apologize. The people who write about it do not apologize. They are nurses and mechanics and gardeners, and they report, in the brief way of the genuinely relieved, that the splits close and stay closed. It is unscented. It has the manners of a tool.

The second is for the hands of nearly everyone else, and it is Neutrogena’s Norwegian Formula: forty parts in a hundred of glycerin, a tube that fits a pocket and lasts a season, and a price that has not alarmed anyone in the whole of its long life. Its reviewers are the briefest of all. They say it works. They stop writing. I have come to trust that.

The third is for the hand that takes offense. Reactive, the moderns say — eczema-prone, or merely tired of being washed — and for these the CeraVe carries the ingredients the dermatologists ask for by name, the ceramides and the hyaluronic acid, and a seal from the eczema association that I am told is not given lightly. I have written elsewhere of this house’s cleanser, and the hand cream reads in the same hand. It is not the cream for a deep crack. It is the cream for a hand that would like, for once, to be left in peace.

The fourth is French — bien sûr — and I will not pretend that counts for nothing. The L’Occitane shea butter cream is what the editors call an everyday luxury, which is a phrase my century would not have understood, luxury having been, in my experience, rather rarer than every day. But the letters persuade me. Women write of buying the same tube every winter for twenty years. That is not enthusiasm; that is a household. It is scented, which the reactive hand will resent, and it is thirty-four dollars, which the frugal hand will resent more. It is also the only one of the four that makes the ritual pleasant, and the ritual — twice a day, after washing, for the rest of one’s life — is long.

Two things the correspondence agrees on, whichever cream one keeps. Apply it while the hands are still faintly damp from washing, and again at night; the dermatologists say so, and the reviewers who report the best results are the ones who keep the tube by the sink rather than in a drawer where it is admired and not used. And remember that the dryness is often the room’s doing as much as the hands’ — the winter air in old buildings, of which I have some experience, is merciless, and my colleagues have filed their opinions on the humidifiers worth running through the dry months. A cream can only do so much against a radiator.

That is the whole of it. Four creams, none of them elaborate, all of them kept — and of the four, the Neutrogena is where I would send a person who asked me once and did not wish to ask again, with the O’Keeffe’s for the hands that have already gone to pieces. I have all the time in the world to reconsider, and hands, as it happens, that will never need any of them. I find I do not envy the living this particular chore. I find I rather envy them the tube.