Old Hands? Wash Dishes

Do you remember the many Ivory dish soap commercials from the 1960s or 70s where viewers were asked to decide which hand belonged to the mom and which to her adult daughter? Or, like the one embedded here, where women try to determine each others' ages based on how young their hands look?



The solution is always that by washing dishes with Ivory, homemakers will have very young looking hands.

I don't remember how old I was when these types of commercials were popular, but I definitely had no idea how someone's hands could make a person look old. My thought was that hands don't really wrinkle or get saggy like faces, so having young-looking hands would be easy.

In the last year or so I have learned exactly how hands can reveal age! My ever-present nemesis -- the age spot -- is popping up all over the backs of my hands. They are not very big yet (not as big as the ones on my face), but I can feel them and I'm sure they will grow. And no matter how much you moisturize or if you wear gloves in the winter, wrinkles happen -- even on the back of hands. (Don't even get me started on my cuticles.)

So as I look at the backs of my spotted hands, realizing this is just one more indication that I'm getting old, I have an irrational thought -- I should have washed more dishes!
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I probably should have mentioned the enlarged knuckles and prominent veins before I blamed all of the "age" indicators on my spots.