Quick answer

Most UK hands need daily cream from the week the central heating goes on, which for most households is the first half of October. Start sooner if two or three of these turn up in the same week: hands still tight two or three minutes after you towel dry, knuckles gone flat and matte, skin catching on wool.

Table of contents

A month is the answer everyone gives, and a month is a guess about somebody else's house. The trigger is physical: cold outdoor air carries very little water, so warming it indoors collapses the humidity in the room and skin loses water faster than it can replace it. Use early October as the default and let your own hands move it.

The signals on your own hands

Tightness that is still there two or three minutes later

Wash your hands as usual, pat them dry, put nothing on them and check how they feel once the kettle has boiled, two or three minutes later. Skin in decent condition has settled by then.

The knuckles lose their sheen

Healthy skin over the knuckles has a faint gloss under a kitchen light. Once it goes flat and matte, and the fine cross-hatched lines on the back of the hand show without squinting, it has dried out. If those lines go further, red and raised and cracked into a crazy-paving pattern, that is asteatotic eczema and it usually needs a short course of steroid cream from a GP on top of the emollient.

Skin that catches on wool

Pull on a jumper or tights and feel whether your fingertips snag, or notice your hands catching on the sheets at night. That catching is dried, part-detached surface cells, and it shows up before any visible flaking.

Only one hand

Seasonal dryness turns up on both hands at once. One dry, scaly palm with the other fine, especially alongside itchy flaky feet or thickened toenails, usually means a fungal infection. Hand cream will not touch it and steroid creams make it spread, so get it looked at by a pharmacist or GP.

The first split beside a nail

Skin at the sides of the nails is thin and moves constantly, so it dries first, and the first hairline split usually turns up there or on a fingertip pad. Treat one as a deadline: a split takes weeks to settle, where the dry patch before it took days. Whiteness or ragged flaking around the cuticles is the same warning, a stage earlier.

Itch, and what it can mean

Cold-weather dryness itches mildly, usually in the evening or when you come indoors and warm up. Itch that wakes you at night, or small deep blisters on the palms and sides of the fingers, is a different problem that cream will not settle, so see a pharmacist or your GP. If the skin is blistered, crusty, leaking fluid or has pus-filled spots, if it is painful, swollen or warm, if it suddenly worsens, or if you have a high temperature or feel unwell, ask for an urgent GP appointment or call NHS 111 the same day.

Rule one thing out first: itch worst at night, itch that started in the finger webs, or anyone else in the house itching too can all mean scabies. It has nothing to do with hygiene, moisturiser will not touch it, and a pharmacist can supply the treatment, but everyone in the home must be treated on the same day, including those with no symptoms.

And if you are itching badly with little to see beyond scratch marks, and not only on your hands, book a normal GP appointment for blood tests. Itch without a rash can come from low iron, thyroid problems, or liver or kidney trouble.

Four kinds of hands, four different starting points

  • Desk hands. Washed a few times a day, no manual work, mostly indoors. Your hands will not complain until November, but the heating that dries them comes on in early October, so start then and save yourself the month in between.
  • Frequent washers. Nurses, carers, chefs, cleaners, nursery and hospitality staff, parents of small children. This skin is already at its limit in September, so start then. Cream is the second line here. The first is keeping water and cleaning products off the skin: waterproof gloves for washing up, cleaning and any wet task over a few minutes, with a thin cotton liner underneath so hands are not sweating inside the rubber. Hands worse at work and better on holiday point at occupational dermatitis, worth raising with your manager or occupational health, because your employer has a duty to control it. For the cream, a small concentrated tube that lives in a pocket: the Neutrogena Norwegian Formula concentrated unscented hand cream is the obvious one, a dab the size of a 5p coin is enough, and our Neutrogena hand cream review covers why unscented matters more the sorer your hands already are. Two caveats: it sits on the skin for a minute or two, so save the fuller application for breaks and the end of a shift, and being glycerin-heavy with no grease in it, it stings for a few seconds on an open split.
  • Manual and outdoor hands. Builders, gardeners, dog walkers, anyone with wet, cold hands outdoors. Start when you first reach for gloves outdoors, usually late September or early October, because for this group the cold arrives ahead of the heating. Gloves buy you more than any upgrade of cream, and the cream goes on when you get in. Fingers that go white or waxy in the cold, then blue and red as they warm, with pain or numbness, are Raynaud's rather than chapping, worth a GP mention, especially if it started recently in adulthood.
  • Eczema-prone or previously cracked hands. Start before the signal, in early autumn: a crack opens in a day and closes over weeks.
Prep & Flow cycle-syncing meal prep cookbook Featured

15% OFF*Limited offer

One Sunday. A week of food, sorted.

23 high-protein recipes, cycle-synced for women who lift.

23 recipes · 60-page PDF · Instant download

£19.20 £16.32

See it on Etsy

*Seller's discount on Etsy - may end at any time.

Month by month, September to January

The months below are typical, and yours will move. Colder regions cross the threshold sooner, a draughty terrace behaves nothing like a sealed new-build flat, and a mild autumn pushes the sequence back a fortnight. The adjustment rule: count from the day your heating first runs daily, and start earlier than that if you are somewhere that gets cold first, or if your water is hard.

September

In most homes nothing has happened yet. The heating is off, so September dryness comes from something else: a new soap, a heavy washing-up load, a summer of sun and chlorine, or a skin condition. Deal with the cause now. Frequent washers and eczema-prone hands should already be applying daily.

October

Heating tends to start running daily in the first two weeks of October for most UK households, with surveys putting the average around the 1st to the 6th, and indoor humidity falls within days. Begin applying after every hand wash from the day the heating starts, without waiting for your hands to complain. The same collapse in humidity dries out the rest of you too, and our guide to fixing dry skin from central heating covers the whole-house version of this.

November

This is when desk hands catch up. Wind, a heating system now running properly and the season's first colds all add to it. Starting from scratch now feels like catching up for a fortnight.

December

Four things at once: more hand washing, more moving between cold streets and hot shops, a lot more washing up than usual, and heating on all day over the holidays. A gifted, heavily fragranced cream on sore skin is worth putting away until your hands recover. If you have done nothing so far, today beats the new year: after every wash and once before bed, then give it a week before you judge it.

January

January and February are the driest months indoors, because the coldest outdoor air makes for the driest heated rooms, and January is when cracks appear in people who coasted through December. Keep going until the heating goes off for good, usually March or April. Starting now still works, from a worse baseline than an October start would have given you.

How to apply it so it works

  1. Apply while the skin is still damp. Pat your hands most of the way dry and get the cream on inside a couple of minutes, while there is still water in the surface layers to hold in.
  2. Use more than feels polite: enough that it is still visible after you have smoothed it over both hands. Smooth it on gently, in the direction your hair grows, without rubbing. A film that vanishes instantly was too little.
  3. Work it into the places that actually split: the nail folds, the sides of each nail, the webbing between the fingers and the knuckle creases. Once a split has opened, work around it and leave the split itself alone. Most people cream the backs of their hands and miss the sites where cracks start.
  4. Reapply after every wash, even if that means eight times on a Tuesday.
  5. Put something heavier on at night.

For the overnight step, a concentrated, glycerin-heavy hand cream such as O'Keeffe's Working Hands does more for rough, splitting skin than a light lotion will. It sinks in fast and does not sit greasy on top, so for a true overnight seal, put a plain petrolatum or white soft paraffin ointment from the pharmacy over it. O'Keeffe's suits plenty of people and irritates some, which our O'Keeffe's Working Hands review covers, and the usual culprits are its two preservatives.

Test any new product before committing it to sore hands: dab a little inside your forearm twice a day for a week, checking the spot each day. That is intact skin, so a reaction costs you nothing, and a week catches slow reactions a night or two would miss.

A pair of cotton gloves worn overnight keeps it on your skin and off the duvet, with two rules. Only plain emollient goes under gloves, never a prescribed steroid cream unless your GP or pharmacist has told you to cover it, because occlusion can multiply how much your skin absorbs. And do not glove up over skin that is weeping, crusted or looks infected, because sealing that in overnight makes infection more likely. Clean gloves each night, cotton only, never plastic or cling film.

One thing before you sleep in cream and gloves. The MHRA warned in December 2018, and restated it with the fire services in July 2020, that emollients transfer into fabric, and that clothing, bedding and dressings carrying that residue can catch fire and burn fiercely near a naked flame or a cigarette. It covers paraffin-based and paraffin-free products alike. So do not smoke, and keep away from candles, open fires, heaters and gas hobs, while the cream is wet and any time you wear gloves, nightclothes or bedding emollient has soaked into, because the dried residue is what ignites. Washing gloves and bedding often at a high temperature may reduce the build-up, but never fully removes it.

Comfort comes back within a few days. The barrier takes longer, and hands are the slowest part of the body to settle because they are washed all day, so four to six weeks is normal. But if two to three weeks of consistent use has changed nothing, stop shopping for a stronger cream and ask a pharmacist or GP, because dryness that does not shift can be eczema, contact dermatitis or a reaction to something you handle daily.

One exception: a single patch that stays in exactly the same place while the rest of your hand improves, rough, scaly and slightly red on the back of a hand or forearm, and more likely if you are older or have had a lot of sun, needs a GP to look at on its own.

Where it goes wrong

  • Creaming skin that dried out an hour ago. You get the sealing half of the effect and none of the water it was meant to seal in.
  • Reaching for a lotion when hands need an ointment. Lotions are mostly water. Chapped, splitting hands need something greasy enough to be mildly annoying for the first minute, which is what a plain petrolatum ointment gives you.
  • Stopping the day it feels better. Comfort returns well before the barrier does, which is why hands crack again in January.
  • Washing in hot water with a harsh soap, then creaming to repair the damage. Nothing you apply outruns what you strip off. Lukewarm water, a soap that rinses off easily and drying properly between the fingers beat any cream. Where water is hard, rinse for longer, since soap residue adds to the irritation.
  • Filling an open split with cream. A split that is open, weeping or bleeding is a wound. Rinse it, dry around it and hold it closed with a plaster or hydrocolloid dressing. Once it has stopped weeping and is properly dry, a liquid skin adhesive sold for cracked fingertips will hold it shut. Cream goes on the skin around it, and the split stays covered until it closes. Do not seal it at all if it already looks infected, with spreading redness, heat, swelling or pus, because a dressing or adhesive traps bacteria under it: use a simple plaster changed daily and get it seen the same day.
  • Letting a crack turn into something else. Spreading redness, heat, swelling, throbbing pain, yellow crusting or pus, or a red streak running up from it can all mean a skin infection. That needs a same-day GP appointment or a call to NHS 111, and same day means the day you notice it, weekend or not. Call 999 or go to A&E instead if you also have a very high temperature, feel hot, cold or shivery, a fast heartbeat or breathing, confusion, dizziness, or cold, clammy or pale skin, which are signs the infection has spread further.
  • Waiting it out when you have diabetes. A crack, cut or blister on your feet needs your GP or podiatry team the same day or the next working day, never weeks of managing it at home: cover it with a sterile dressing meanwhile and do not burst blisters. Cracked skin on your hands should be reviewed early by your GP, practice nurse or podiatrist. Do not wait for pain: nerve damage from diabetes means an infected crack can look bad and feel like nothing, so check your feet daily by sight.
  • Reading a reaction as the cream not working. Fragrance, lanolin and some preservatives often irritate already-damaged hand skin, and the result looks like the dryness worsening: more redness and itch, sometimes stinging within a day or two of a new product. If it got worse soon after switching, go back to a plain unscented one. Irritation is a dose thing and settles once you stop, while a true allergy comes back every time and means avoiding that ingredient for good. If your hand dermatitis keeps returning despite plain products, ask your GP about patch testing, the only way to find which ingredient it is.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a hand lotion, a cream and an ointment?

Water content, mostly. Lotions are thinnest, ointments greasiest, creams in between. Humectants such as glycerin and urea pull water into the surface layers; occlusives such as petrolatum and dimethicone slow it leaving again. Light by day, heavier at night.

How many times a day should I put it on?

After every hand wash, plus once before bed. Washing is what removes it, so the count follows your day. If you are applying it after every wash and still tight by evening, the cream is too light or the water too hot.

Should I use less hand sanitiser to protect my skin?

No, and swapping gel for extra soap-and-water washing usually leaves hands worse. Alcohol gels contain emollients and strip less of the skin's own lipid than repeated washing does, and skin tolerance is one reason NHS and WHO hand-hygiene guidance prefers gel where either would do. The exceptions: soap and water when hands are visibly dirty, after the loo, before food, and any time there is a stomach bug about, because gel is poor against norovirus. Gel on an open split stings sharply, so cover it with a waterproof plaster first, and let it dry fully before going near a gas hob, since it is flammable while wet.

When should I see a GP about dry hands?

Same day, through your GP or NHS 111, if a crack is spreading redness, feels hot, swells, oozes pus or streaks up the finger, if the skin is blistered, crusty, leaking fluid or has pus-filled spots, or if you feel unwell with it, because that can be a skin infection. Book a normal appointment if the skin itches badly without those signs, or if two to three weeks of consistent emollient use has changed nothing. With diabetes, a crack, cut or blister on your feet needs your GP or podiatry team the same day or the next working day, and cracked skin on your hands needs reviewing early.