extra moisture

[cimorene]

It's a good thing I started the oil cleanse method (for face washing) a couple of years ago (and stopped last summer when we got stuck here bc everything was too hectic and there wasn't space) because now I have a bunch of jojoba oil and castor oil, and my hands started to crack from the washing last week until I started being more careful about rubbing gently. My regular moisturizers go on first, and then I dab the oil mixture on the irritated bits and torn places, around the cuticles, and into the fingertips, which are starting to roughen and hopefully will not callus, and massage it in. The higher the oil content of moisturizer, the more work it takes to wash off, but it also doesn't evaporate or wear off as quickly and is hence more protective. (Any sort of oil will work for this, but I'd rather save the olive oil for cooking and coconut oil is solid at room temperature right now, which makes it inconvenient.)

Speaking of moisturizers, we got a ton of them from MIL, and I saved most of them, but she had a fondness for the perfumed stuff from The Body Shop. Even their scents that I like I can pretty much only have on my legs and feet, let alone the hands - they're a guaranteed sneezing fit. Wax doesn't have this reaction, but she prefers the grapefruit scent so strongly that I predict it will be hard to get her to use up the others (I've found like four). I opened a tube labeled "hemp hand protector" the other day and it was so nauseatingly strong smelling that I had to use oil and soap to wash it off and then I had to change shirts. The stink was still noticeable in the air like 6 hours later. On the other hand, the almond-scented hand night cream or whatever it's called is comparatively bearable. Still strong enough to make me sneeze if I wore it on my hands in the daytime, though.

Comments

[anatsuno]

Sense of smell varies soooo much! I have the hemp hand protector and it's one of my favorites in terms of efficacy, and while I find its scent strong, I stop smelling it after a half hour or so unless I put my hand near my nose! I must be nearly smell-deaf compared to you *g*

[cimorene]

Smell is much weirder than that: people can get oversensitive to certain smells (or rather, I assume, to certain elements in smells... esters or... whatever other molecules it is) and remain undersensitive to other ones. There may be a method to the madness but not one anybody has ever explained to me.

Apparently it's rather more normal than not, that if you're oversensitive to smells, it's to certain selected smells and not to all of them. I guess that's good... because if it was all of them I would just never want to smell anything at all and I would have a very hard time filling that order.

ETA: Ex: Tea tree oil has a strong smell and so do the catfoods I feed the cats, but I'm used to them. Eucalyptus has a very strong odor, but strong eucalyptus just annoys me, it doesn't make me sneeze, and the catfood smells no longer nauseate or overwhelm me after a bit more than a year of this diet for the cats. Tea tree oil not only doesn't make me sneeze and never has, I primarily use it on my face - it was distracting when I started using it that way of course, but it never made me gag or sneeze or whatever. Yet the hemp one does, and so does, for example, cooking fish soup - always has, no idea why!