I lay my hands on the table, palms down, for inspection. I’m in the consulting room of the president of the British College of Aesthetic Medicine (BCAM) in London. Like most people, I use my hands a lot. I type for hours a day. I go bouldering, which means I have a lot of calluses. I cook, clean, cup my chin while staring out the window. What I’ve never done is to look at my hands as objects of interest in their own right. They’re an afterthought. The means to an end. But now that Dr Sophie Shotter has picked them up in hers and is weighing my flesh and pushing at the skin with her thumbs to see how it moves, I can see faint ripples of diamonds, the texture of crepe paper.
“Your facial skin is very clear, very smooth. When we look at your hands, you’ve got a bit more of that laxity going on,” Shotter says. “You don’t have pigmentation. You’re not covered in sunspots. But the veins and tendons testify to a loss of volume. The extreme end of that is one day we get what people describe as ‘old lady hands’ – significant volume loss with skin fragility overlying it.”
This dissonance between a person’s “face age” and “hand age” has long captured the imagination. Tabloids have “hand-shamed” female celebrities for at least a decade. Not a huge amount has changed between tabloid photographs of Joan Collins, Madonna, Sarah Jessica Parker, showing their hands in shot with their faces, and the Daily Mail’s assertion in February that “hands don’t lie” but disclose our true, undoctored age. From here, it is a short hop to accusing women – Kris Jenner, for instance – of hiding their hands from public view to avoid the comparison.
The belief that our hands somehow give us away, tell the truth about us no matter how much care we take of our faces, is driving a kind of facialisation of handcare. Two years ago, Vogue reported that hand creams were “the new status symbol”. Increasingly, they boast the same premium ingredients as facial skincare: retinol, vitamin C, hyaluronic acid, collagen and PDRN (derived from salmon sperm), a trending ingredient in Korean beauty. They come in tactile packages shaped like pods or pebbles, crying out to be handled, or clipped on to a handbag. In 2022 global sales of premium handcare jumped to $724m (£544m), up 23.5% from $586m in 2019, according to Euromonitor.
There are also LED hand masks and mitts, microcurrent devices and gel gloves. Or, at the more extreme end, laser pigmentation removal for sunspots, and surgical “fat transfer” procedures – taking tissue from another part of the body and injecting it into the hands. This is more expensive, and carries a risk of infection or aesthetically displeasing results, but one cosmetic surgeon in the US told the Wall Street Journal recently that fat transfer to the hands “is now a near-constant add-on for his facelift patients, for an extra five-figure price”.
“One thing we can predict, from what we see in terms of launches and interest in aesthetic treatments, is more spending on hands,” says Georgia Stafford, a beauty analyst at Mintel, which estimated the UK handcare market at £174m in 2025.
“If you think beyond the face and neck, hands are the part of ourselves that are most on display. They’ve definitely entered consumer awareness more,” Shotter says. And Dev Patel, an aesthetic doctor based in the UK, agrees: “There’s a growing awareness that hands play into the perception someone is going to have when they’re judging your age,” he says.
There are biological reasons for this. The skin on our hands has fewer oil glands than the skin on our faces. It’s more prone to dryness, and that’s even without factoring in the multiple daily washes. The skin is thinner than on other parts of the body, because our hands need to be flexible. It also contains less collagen – the main protein that provides structure and support to our bodies.
When it comes to anti-ageing and rejuvenation treatments, “the magic word is harmony”, Patel says. “We have four faces: face, neck, chest and hands. There’s no point just working on one. If it’s not matching and there’s no harmony, then we pick up on something else, which is a lack of authenticity. I liken it to a car. You wouldn’t clean the front half of your car and leave the back half.”
Stafford says that ageing prevention is “one of the big trends in facial skincare” in the UK, especially among 25- to 44-year-old women. She thinks that consumers have learned about ingredients in facial skincare and are keen to “bring them down below the neck”.
Neither Patel nor Shotter will be drawn on my hand age v my face age, but Shotter suggests an injectable moisturiser and half a syringe of a filler containing collagen, fanned out “to help stimulate some skin tightening and give a very gentle volume”, which would supposedly make my hands harmonise better with my face. She also recommends potential patients use BCAM’s Vet It Before You Get It questionnaire to ensure the safety of any procedure considered.
The foundations for this market growth may have been laid during the pandemic, when sanitiser became a hero product, often in short supply – and alongside it came a growing awareness of the part our hands play in our health. We washed them observantly, slathered them in sanitiser, and became hypervigilant about where we put them. And the more sanitiser we applied, the drier the skin on our hands became.
The year before Covid struck, Amy Welsman, who founded the handcare brand Paume (French for palm), became a parent, and found herself pumping squirts of astringent sanitiser on to her hands dozens of times a day. She began to fantasise about a “luxurious hand sanitiser product that smelled really good and was skin-nourishing and had plant-based ingredients that were healthier for us”.
“I thought: there’s an opportunity to create products that are formulated like we would formulate products for our face.” Expensive hand cream used to be all about the perfume – Chanel launched its egg-shaped product in 2017, turning hand cream into an accessory in its own right – but now, Welsman says, “bodycare brands are leading with ingredients”.
The idea that our hands tell the truth about us is “everybody’s story”, she says. “That was certainly what inspired the line. They’re our second most exposed body part but we totally neglect them.”
Welsman would like us to approach our hands as mindfully, and with the same sense of ritual and benefit, as we do our faces. She performs her own routine nightly. First, she exfoliates. Sometimes a nail brush follows. Then comes Paume’s serum, followed by the cuticle and nail cream. Once a week, she slathers a mask all over her hands and sleeps in cotton gloves. If this sounds expensive, Welsman often uses her hand products on her face – they are cheaper than the facial equivalents.
But do consumers really have time to take on another self-care responsibility? At retailers Sephora and Cult Beauty, hand-specific products remain a lowly subcategory of bodycare, lumped in with feet.
Ah, feet. Less exposed than hands, granted – but for many of us they are even more of a dark secret, shrouded in socks for months at a time, a scaly hinterland that body lotion rarely reaches. It is only a matter of time.