On Style: Hands...

Baby soft skin is always nice, but if you, like me, work with your hands, it isn’t always possible to keep your grabbers in such good condition.

If you do manual work for a living, a gritty scrub is advisable – you can buy decent ones from somewhere like boots, but for mechanics and the like, a grease-stripper would work better.

Use a heavy-duty moisturiser to keep your hands soft and to aid the healing of any nicks and scrapes you might have picked up during the day.

A nice one I like is Norwegian Formula by Neutrogena. It comes in really small tubes too, so you can always keep it on your person for emergency situations (these are rare, but O my God, when they strike beware!).

Another thing to consider – especially if you use a lot of free weights in your workout – is calices developing on your palms, just below your fingers. If you don’t wear gloves when lifting heavy weight, the metal grip on the bar can really do a number on your delicate palms. In this case, prevention is better than the cure, so to avoid thickening skin on your palms, wear good quality weight-lifting gloves with a sturdy wrist-support. Even such preventative measures might not be enough to stop the emergence of dreaded calices. To remove them once they have grown, get a pumice stone and scrub them off. The thing is if you lift weights all the time, the soft skin left after a good pumicing is more susceptible to quick re-hardening. There isn’t really a way to prevent this and frequent pumicing can leave your hands sore. Make sure you moisturiser after removing calices, but better still, if you train with weights on a seasonal basis, i.e. throughout the winter when the weather doesn’t encourage outdoor cardio or team practice (depending on your sport), leave your calices throughout the gym season and remove them when you leave the weight-room for an extended period.

If all else fails, wear gloves, but do try and remember to take them off indoors…



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