Why does washing your hands frequently dry out the skin?
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The moisture in your skin is not actually from water. It is from fat and oils in your skin. When you wash your hands in soap this soap will dissolve the oils and you rinse it away. This leaves the dry skin cells behind.
Alkaline soaps by nature are meant to remove oils (think of your dish soap washing a greasy pan) but sometimes some of the good oils come with that as well, soap can not distinguish. So that is why we use lotion on our skin, or conditioner after shampooing to replace some of the good moisturizing oils that were washed away.
The oily stuff covering your skin (called sebum) constitutes a watertight layer over it and serves to prevent water evaporation from deeper layers of skin. Soap removes this oily watertight layer, so water starts evaporating from skin, causing dryness. This continues until the sebaceous glands in the skin manage to secrete enough sebum to restore that oily layer.
Yes it does and its so annoying!! I have had this problem for a long time but then my wife introduced me to O’Keeffe’s Working Hands cream and it works wonders!! The trick is to actually continue to work a bit of it into your hands until you start feeling a generous grip like sensation. I mentioned it all in the link below!
Regards,
Jeycholz
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