Simple tips to heal your hands after constant washing
Twenty seconds of hand washing can trounce most viral particles. Ironically, it also dries out your skin. Here's why. (Irina Ba/Unsplash/)Celestine Wong is a consultant dermatologist at Monash Health. Rosemary Nixon is a honorary clinical associate professor at the University of Melbourne. This story originally featured on The Conversation.Washing your hands is one of the crucial ways we can all help limit the spread of COVID-19.Regularly and thoroughly washing your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds or using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer are key steps to reducing the risk.But with all this hand washing, it’s easy to get dry skin or for existing skin conditions to flare up.What’s happening to our skin?The top layer of our skin (the stratum corneum) is our skin’s key protective layer. But frequent hand washing with repetitive exposure to water, soap, and skin cleansers will disrupt this layer.Over time, this leads...