Why Do Hands Wrinkle?

So you may want to know why do your hands wrinkle. There are two really key elements. The first one is sun. You get a lot of sun on your hands. The sun breaks down the collagen, breaks down the elastin. Basically the skin gets more wrinkled. The skin gets thinner. One other thing that happens with hands as we age, we lose the fat in our hands. If you take a baby and you look at a baby, they have these nice, plump, young hands. Look at the hands of someone who's 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, you'll see they get skinnier and skinnier. You see more veins. You see more bones. And as you lose the fat, the hand looks older and older.

So what can we do for your hands? Several things. We can do chemical peels. It makes the skin thicker. We can actually inject fillers or fat into your skin. So one way to help your hands look younger is to apply creams regularly. Like any other skin on your body, when your hands become dehydrated, they are going to start looking older and cracked. So if you drink more water and if you use hand creams regularly, you're going to plump up your skin and make them look younger.

Another thing that happens to hands is they get dark spots. It's interesting, if you look at a golfer, you can pick a golfer out immediately because the hand that wears the glove, the left hand, looks younger and less marked than the right hand. But, again, that's the sun. So sunscreen is essential. If you get these dark spots on your hands, you can use bleaching creams that help remove those dark spots or we do chemical peels where we remove those dark spots. Once you take the dark spots off the hands, the hands start looking younger.
by Dr. Steven Victor