I know there are more than one hairdressers on the boards. I was looking for a forum FOR hairdressers...to share industry questions/ideas/news, but the ones I found looked incredibly slow.
Anyhow...I'm wondering if any hairdressers out there suffer from dermatitis due to the chemicals we work with. I had TERRIBLE problems with this in the 80's and attributed it to the many perms we all did (we all had to have that BIG HAIR!!) and I eventually had to quit because of it. That was the only thing that gave me relief from it. So, now that I'm older, I decided to go back to hairstyling, but before I got too involved with customers, etc, I decided to start out at Master Cuts and this way if I had problems, I could just quit with no harm done. Well, the whole year I was there, I had not one outbreak. I attributed it to the newer perms not being quite so caustic and the fact that my skin is now about 15-20 years older and more ornery and tougher than it used to be.
So...I decide to open my own shop here in my village. Well, now that summer is here I'm massively busy... MY HANDS ARE IN HORRIBLE SHAPE AGAIN!! My husband...God bless his pea-pickin heart...he's only trying to help...is all, try lanolin or vitamin E or vaseline intensive care! Trust me when I tell you I've tried all of these things and none of them work. I don't have dry skin, I have a horrible rash. I went to the pharmacist and she said, "I dunno...try hydrocortizone" I've had exactly every single brand and strength of hydrocortizone on my hands and it only aggrevates it. It needs to be dried out...you know those little clear pimples you get and the swelling and oozing of the sores. I put up with it for over 10 years in the 80's/90's.
I really don't want to close up my shop. I love it so much. But I can't even cook with these sores on my fingers. You should try squeezing a lemon! I used to have these sores all the way up the inside of my forearms and covering every single finger from tip to palm. I couldn't even bend my fingers. I don't want to suffer with it again. Have any of you hairdressers had this problem and have you come across a fix for it?
I can't help but think it looks a lot like athlete's foot. Do you think an antifungal cream would help?