Hands are the hardest skin on the body to look after, for one reason: they are washed twenty times a day and every wash removes the barrier you are trying to build. Timing beats formulation here.
One habit does more than any product on this page.
Washing strips the oils that hold water in the skin. If you dry your hands completely and then apply cream twenty minutes later, you are moisturising skin that has already lost the water. Applied to damp hands, the cream traps what is still there.
The practical version: leave a tube by every sink you use. Compliance is the entire problem, and a cream in a drawer is a cream you use twice a week.
Hands that stay slippery mean nothing gets touched for ten minutes, so the cream comes straight back off on a towel. Hemp oil sinks in fast enough to survive normal use.
Linoleic acid is what skin uses to make its own barrier lipids. Occlusives like petrolatum seal well and add nothing; a combination of both is what actually works in winter.
Cracked skin reacts badly to alcohol and fragrance, which is most of what is in the bottle by the office sink. An unscented oil or balm can go on skin that is already split.
Cold air holds less water and central heating holds less still. A light lotion that works in June is not enough in January — you want something that stays put.
A thick layer of balm and a pair of cotton gloves in bed. It looks absurd and it repairs split fingertips in two or three nights when nothing else has for weeks.
Hot water and detergent strip faster than anything else in a normal day, and cold wind is second. Prevention costs less effort than repair.
Foaming hand washes are efficient degreasers and that is exactly the problem. A plain cold-process soap, or a cream cleanser, changes hands more than upgrading the moisturiser will.
Deep painful cracks, especially with redness spreading, are past the point a shelf helps. A pharmacist has better tools and they are inexpensive.
Cream for daytime and frequent reapplication, balm for overnight and for winter. A balm on hands at nine in the morning means an hour of touching nothing successfully, which is why people stop using it.
Alcohol gels are drying and they sting broken skin, but they are less damaging to the barrier than repeated washing with hot water and detergent. Sanitise when hands are not visibly dirty, wash when they are, and moisturise after both.
Fingertip skin is thick, has few oil glands and flexes constantly, so it dries and then cracks along the flex lines. It responds better to occlusion overnight than to anything applied during the day.