As you may already be aware, Fall is the best. There’s just one thing that annoys me this time of year . . .actually who am I kidding? There are many things that annoy me on a daily basis, but only this one particular thing can be blamed on this otherwise glorious, cool, crisp time of the year. Chapped hands.

I must be like a less severe the dude in big fish, as in if there isn’t enough moisture I just dry up and die. Because the second the air gets cooler and dryer my hands start to shrivel up. I have a little night time routine to prevent the oncoming snake-hands syndrome so I’ll show you that. But I also know that sometimes I get lazy and don’t do that routine, so I’ll show you what to do to get your hands back to normal too. Covering all the bases like a boss.

So on a normal day-to-day basis when I haven’t been a lazy ass and let my hands get too dry, I like to mix a very thick hand cream like this J.R. Watkins one that smells like lemon cookies, with an equal amount of Elizabeth Arden Eight Hour Cream and slather it on my hands when I first wake up in the morning and before I go to bed. I should just change the name of this blog to 1001WaysToUseEightHourCreamandCoconutOil.com. You’ll see what I mean in a minute. Hmm . . .I wonder if that domain is available. I’m 75% Kidding.

If I do that regularly it stops my hands from turning into two hand-shaped leather bags. In the event that I don’t do it regularly and things get out of hand (see what I did there? womp wooomp) It may be time to break out the big guns.

Before bed time, I like to start by scrubbing them. Most of the time I like to use my own DIY hand scrub, but you can really use any body scrub you have on hand OR sugar mixed with olive or coconut oil. Anything that will add some moisture and scrub off excess dead skin.

Once they’re good and scrubbed, take the same hand cream and instead of mixing it with equal parts eight hour cream, mix one part hand cream and TWO parts coconut oil. It will be much more oily and greasy than the other version, so I like to slip on a pair of cotton gloves over the oil and cream mixture. This will do two things, it will keep the oily mixture from getting all over your sheets and stuff AND it will keep it in contact with your skin for the whole night and give you a much better result.

It will also stop you from staying up until 4am looking at things on Pinterest on your phone, so I guess it’s really three useful things it does 😉

Usually one night of this combination gets them back to normal for me, but you can do it a few nights in a row if you need to. I always feel like they’re much more soothed feeling right away though, even if they do need another night of moisture. You can also follow it up with the hand cream/ eight hour cream combination during the day.

Give it a try if you get dried, chapped hands this time of year, and let me know how it goes!

Tags:  diy hands nails skincare