Lotion for Dry, Bleeding Hands

I cannot say enough things about how amazing this cream is. 

Every winter I tend to encounter the same awful problem, but it can happen any time of year. It started for the first time when I was working in the food service industry back in college but it also got really bad the spring that my then-toddler was running about before starting kindergarten. 

It seems for every time I am put in a position to be washing my hands frequently, my skin dries out enough to crack and bleed around the knuckles.

It is horrifying and I didn't bother to take pictures of it because it's gross and worries me, but it looked kind of like this.

Just imagine every red conjunction of lines to be a small open wound, worst at the middle knuckle and pinky, but genuinely uncomfortable all over. That's my usual, especially in winter during the pandemic. This rendering was done with filters instead, but it makes me uncomfortable just looking at it all the same.

The pandemic has made both my need to wash my hands and my discomfort with having open wounds on my hands worse than before. With my family's trip to Tokyo approaching, I started looking at my options in the drug store at the beginning of December.

After a little bit of cost comparison shopping in the lotion section, I decided on this one. Nivea had some similar options but were more expensive and for smaller amounts. Using this a few times a day and filling up a travel bottle with it, I still have half a container left.

Check out this great big bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care Advanced Repair and just look what it did to my hand!

It cost a little over 1,000 yen for 400 milliliters and after using it a few times a day for less than a week, my hands weren't bleeding anymore. At the end of the week, I was no longer dreading the use of hand sanitizer as it wouldn't be causing my pain anymore. My hands were healed!

Self care seems obvious and necessary but it is weirdly hard even as an adult to admit that I should just buy some intensive lotion that might work in the hope of not walking around the nation's capital with bleeding hands. I'm so glad I made the right call.

If your hands get so dry that they bleed and you don't have the time or ability to see a dermatologist, check out Vasaline Intensive Care Advanced Repair. I found it to be 100% worth it.