I have for you a new winter feature called The BeautyJudy Hand Care Series! I’ve been working on the concept for about a month, so I’m very excited to bring you the first installment!!
I don’t know about you, but my fingers and hands get dry and cracked and tear holes in my stockings during cold weather. Since I’ve received some products to review for you, and I have other products to give a try that I’ve bought, I decided to review them and share with you various stats about the products, and how they work (or don’t, if the case may be) for me.
In order to give each product an appropriate review, I’ve decided to test them for a minimum of two weeks, so this winter I will have something to show you every two weeks.
I am kicking off this mini-series with one of three Barielle hand creams/treatments that my contact there was generous enough to send me. The one I’m reviewing today is called Professionnal Protective Hand Cream. Here’s a product shot:
The stats
This hand cream is for dry, chapped hands. Blair, my contact, told me she applies this multiple times a day and loves it. According to the tube, this product is “rich in emollients, vitamin E and protein.” The cream helps “moisturize hands while forming an invisible shield to help protect against water, wind or extreme cold.”
Ingredients that stood out to me were lanolin and mineral oil. On the web site, Barielle says the product also has wheat germ oil. This all sounded good to me.
Then I went to an Arbonne demonstration, and the consultant had two Ritz crackers in bowls – one bowl had water in it, the other mineral oil/baby oil. The cracker had been soaking in water less than two hours and the one in mineral oil had been soaking for two or three days. When the consultant went to grab the water-based cracker, it was mushy and fell apart. When she grabbed the cracker in mineral oil, she was able to bang it against the side of the bowl and it was still crisp.
Mineral oil does not get absorbed into your skin, she said, so it’s a surface treatment.
So, for most of the two weeks I used this cream (the demo was the day after I started using it) I had that in the back of my mind. But I came to this conclusion: Barielle hand cream has mineral oil, and I still found the hydration benefits, even hours after I applied it.
It is recommended that you use the hand cream after you wash your hands, which makes sense to me; doing that will capture the moisture of your hands and retain it – which is perhaps why my hands felt smooth? Even though oil is not absorbed, the moisture that it encased on my skin was.
I’ve also heard that using antibacterial soaps tends to dry skin out, too, so cream is not a bad idea!
Directions also say to apply liberally to hands and “massage in an upward motion.”
Here’s a shot of the cream, which has a blue tint to it:
The sniff test
All hand creams either have some kind of a scent (or not if they’re unscented hehehe). How you feel about a certain smell is individual (otherwise we wouldn’t have so many fragrances to choose from at the store!) so please keep in mind that my testimonial is my testimonial 
To start off, this cream passed the boyfriend sniff test. Mike’s reaction was “Ooooh. That smells clean!”
I agree with Mike. The scent of the Professional Protective Hand Cream is clean, and most times soft. At other times, though, it reminded me of a heavy floral muskiness, something like Bath and Body Works Moonlight Path.
The only time the scent bothered me was in week one, when I had a migraine with nausea. The scent seemed overwhelmingly perfumey to me. When there weren’t little men with sledgehammers hitting around in my brain, and butterflies weren’t stirring things up in my stomach, I found the scent pleasant.
As I was prepping and writing this review, something dawned on me. I can’t wear Moonlight Path (or anything heavily floral) because I get a bad headache. I am now wondering if my headache was more my reaction to my liberal use of this cream? I don’t know. I would like to think not, as the last week of my test, I did not have a migraine. I’ll chalk it up to coincidence, and as I use it in tandem with one of the other Barielle creams, I’ll see what happens.
The only time I received a negative reaction to the scent of the cream was while on a road trip to the aforementioned Arbonne demonstration. I applied the hand cream. My Aunt Lu said, “did someone just spray something or use something?” I told her I just applied hand cream. Her nose was wrinkled when she acknowledged me and I could tell the scent bothered her.
The price, availability
This cream is $15 online for the 6 oz tube. I have the 2.5 oz trial size tube, which retails for $8.
I have seen Barielle hand creams at Ulta, TJ Maxx and Image Beauty. You can also buy them on the Barielle site, which is linked above.
The BeautyJudy experience
This cream feels smooth, not oily, on the surface of my skin. After each use of this cream, my skin had a glow about it. I started using it Nov. 7, which is not quite the coldest weather in my hometown but it is cool enough to start thinking about what the cold does to my hands, and how I’d like to protect them!
One of my concerns in hydration is the skin around my nails. When I am nervous, I tend to bite that skin. Sometimes I have angry red wounds alongside my nail beds from the effort. About a week and a half through the test, the skin looked like this:
Flakey? Yes. You can see that shamefully, I have bitten around the skin by my nail beds, but that I don’t have any red, angry wounds. By the end of the two weeks, I only had two. I don’t bite that skin as much when there’s creamy scented goodness on my hands.
I mentioned earlier in this post that I felt the cream was hydrating. One particular morning, I used the cream in the early part of my work day, while at my desk, after washing my hands post-bathroom break. The silky feeling of my skin – not greasy – stuck with me until after lunch. I noticed it after an afternooon bathroom break; my hands hadn’t really lost the moisture they’d captured from that earlier morning lotion application.
So overall, I enjoyed this lotion. Before I say I’d buy it, I have to make sure the headache is a coincidence. Keep in mind this cream is a great buy – especially if you can get it at Ulta with a coupon, or at TJ Maxx super-reduced!
Thanks all!
First up is C-C-Courage:
