How Often Should You Moisturize Your Hands?
Most people should moisturize their hands at least five times a day. In colder weather or with frequent hand washing, a morning-and-night routine is rarely enough. Consistent moisturizing supports nail health by keeping nail walls supple, reducing hangnails, and helping manicures last longer.
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So How Often Should You Moisturize Your Hands?
Helping Your Nails Last Longer
So How Often Should You Moisturize Your Hands?
Three? Ten? Somewhere in between? The truth is that – as with anything – there’s no perfect number for everyone.
That being said, our recommendation is at least five times a day for most people. Why?
During the winter, you wash your hands more. Add in the frigid temperatures and drying winds, and your hands need all the help they can get.
Moisturizing less is rarely enough — more is often better.
An easy way to get into moisturizing more is to moisturize every time after using the bathroom. After washing and drying off your hands, apply lotion before reaching for the bathroom door.
Here’s a little mantra: flush, wash, dry, moisturize.
Then, if you go to the bathroom more than five times a day, the habit will follow and the number of times you moisturize will naturally increase.
Helping Your Nails Last Longer
Moisturizing the hands throughout the day is our first and foremost recommendation for after care.
Moisturizing maintains the suppleness of nail walls, helping with elasticity and smoothness.
For clients who follow this recommendation, this makes their hands look and feel amazing, while helping nails last longer.
At the Atelier, manicures are protection – protection for the natural nail as they regrow.
When you fill out our intake form describing your concern with nail damage, moisturizing regularly (remember, at least five times a day) gives you an additional week of wear.
This means that your nails have an extra week to reshape and regrow undisturbed.
Moisturizing More for Hangnail Care
Hangnails are more than a little annoyance as you go about your day.
Hangnails often serve as signs that your nails will start chipping and peeling weeks before they should. Why?
Your nails and surrounding skin grow outwardly at every moment as you sleep, eat, and work.
And these two forces grow at separate speeds.
Moisturizing — and the suppleness and elasticity of the skin it facilitates — maintains a buffer.
A margin of safety that ensures that as the nail plates and nail walls grow, the gel layer bridging the two will remain strong.
Hangnails are simple: they’re most often caused by dry skin.
Hangnails are signs that the skin is not flexible enough, and will eventually pull apart the gel layer.
The good news: starting now and given enough moisture — combined with True Nail Care — hangnails flake off, without a painful trace.
Moisturize with Lotion Only – No Oil
If moisturizing is the goal, cuticle oil would help even more, right?
Not so fast.
At the Atelier, we don’t recommend putting cuticle oil regularly on gel nails.
While it can help with moisturizing on bare nail plates, with gel nails, the oil can seep into the microgap between the product and the natural nail, forcing separations in the seal.
These separations can then become ideal pockets for bacteria and fungus to grow.
As with all things, considering the process — how you do something — is often as important as the end goal.
Moisturizing is no exception: how you moisturize matters as much as moisturizing itself.
