Full disclosure: I wash my hands a lot. Like, a lot. I’m not full-on germaphobe, although there’s a bit of that. I genuinely love the feeling of cool water mixed with suds, lapping up and around and over my hands. Sometimes it gives me the energy boost I need at work, and other times it has a soothing quality that helps me relax. But washing your hands like eight times a day can cause a serious dry-skin issue. I always keep a selection of different types of moisturizers around me, I’m constantly slathering them on, and have literally never been satisfied by any of them. Every winter my hands turn to sandpaper: They get that weird mix of red and white flaky; sometimes they bleed. Summers are better, but not a ton (maybe I should try a humidifier). Anyway, it’s gross. But it’s also not like I’m ever going to not wash my hands after I take out the garbage — let’s just be real — which meant I had sort of gotten used to having reptile hands half the year.
Until I encountered Gloves in a Bottle. I came across it in a pharmacy frequented by sun-bleached and salt-water-streaked fishermen and scallopers in a New England seaside town (okay, okay, it was Nantucket, but I swear there are actual fishermen there). I was waiting for a prescription when I noticed my hands were especially dry and said to my mother-in-law that I was dying for some lotion. The clerk overheard me, handed me a sample, and just said: Trust me. “You will love it,” he said. “It’s the secret weapon of men and women here, who are plagued by dry skin after years of plunging their hands into the freezing Massachusetts ocean.”
Which sounds like a sales pitch right out of a bad commercial, I know. But putting it on, I could immediately tell that this was going to be a product I’d be loyal to for the rest of my hand-washing days. It’s unscented, which is great, and provided literally instantaneous relief. It’s not oily or greasy, but instead feels like a layer of super soft skin grew in a nano-second over my old dry gross jagged hands. I couldn’t quite put my finger on how to describe it, except to say that it felt like a protective glove … in a bottle.
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