Why Nothing Worked for Your Crepey Hands After Menopause, and the 1 Thing That Can

I've been a menopause specialist for 17 years.

I've also been through menopause myself.

And there's one conversation I had with a patient about six months ago that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Her name was Sherry. Fifty-five. Office manager at a dental practice. Two years past her last period.

She came in on a Tuesday in August. It was ninety-five degrees out.

She was wearing a long cardigan with the sleeves pulled down over her hands.

She sat down and tucked her hands under her legs.

I asked if she was cold.

"No," she said. "I'm good."

On paper, she was. Her hot flashes were down. She was sleeping through the night again. Her labs looked great.

But for twenty minutes, she never looked up. And she never once took her hands out.

At the end, I asked if there was anything else.

She was quiet for a long time.

Then she pulled her hands out and set them on my desk. Palms down.

"I was at a red light last week," she said. "I looked down at my hands on the wheel, and I swear I thought I was looking at my mom's hands."

I've never forgotten that.

•••

Here's what Sherry's chart looked like when she first came to me, about a year before that conversation.

She'd come in for the night sweats. She wasn't sleeping. She was losing words in the middle of sentences at work.

Her hands never came up. Back then, they were the one part of her body she never thought about.

She got a manicure every other Friday. She wore her mom's ring on her right hand every day.

By the time I saw her that day, a year later, everything had changed.

She pulled her phone out of her purse and scrolled back to May. A picture from her niece's graduation party. Sherry holding a glass of wine, her mom's ring on her finger.

"That's May," she said.

Then she held her hand out next to the phone.

"This is now."

I looked at the picture. Then at her hand.

In the photo, the backs of her hands were smooth. Now the skin was thin and crinkled. When she bent her fingers, it bunched up over her knuckles and stayed that way a second too long.

"It happened over one summer," she said. "It looks like tissue paper somebody balled up. And now it's on my arms. My neck."

She'd stopped the Friday manicures. "What's the point," she said.

She'd moved her mom's ring to her jewelry box.

"I used to never look at my hands," she said. "Now I check them at every red light."

•••

I asked her what she'd tried.

I asked if she'd shown her regular doctor.

"I did. He laughed and told me it's just aging."

She'd looked into laser, too. Expensive. Several sessions. And a friend told her it made her legs look worse.

I asked her what she does for her hands at night now.

"Vaseline. Every night since June."

"And in the morning?"

She was quiet for a second. "Soft. For about an hour. By lunch they look the same again."

Months of it. Same jar of Vaseline. Same hands.

•••

Sherry wasn't my only patient with this.

Not even close.

I see it three, four, sometimes five times a week. Women between about 45 and 65. A few years into menopause. All of them doing everything right. Moisturizing, drinking water, wearing sunscreen.

And all of them stuck in the same loop. Moisturize. Soft for an hour. Crepey by lunch. Moisturize again.

But Sherry's case was the one that made me start asking questions.

Because she wasn't neglecting her hands. She was taking better care of them than she ever had.

Sherry wasn't scared of getting older. She's 55. She knows her hands won't look 25.

What scared her was how fast it happened. Her hands looked like hers in May. By August, they looked twenty years older than the rest of her.

"If it did this in one summer," she said, "what's it going to look like in five years?"

That's what every one of these women is afraid of.

Not a few wrinkles. The speed. That her hands are aging faster than she is, and it's not slowing down.

•••

The question I couldn't stop asking was: why wasn't anything working?

She was moisturizing more than ever. Drinking more water than ever. Taking collagen every morning.

And her hands were getting worse, not better.

So what was actually happening in her skin that lotion, Vaseline and crepe cream couldn't touch?

•••

Here's what I found.

I spent the next several weeks buried in research on menopause and skin. PubMed at midnight. A study out of a London hospital from the 1980s. Lab papers from France I had to read three times.

The first thing I found explained Sherry's summer.

Researchers in London had measured the collagen in women's skin after menopause. Collagen is what keeps your skin thick and springy. They found women can lose up to about 30% of it in the first five years after menopause.

Her skin hadn't aged slowly. It lost a lot, fast.

•••

So the real question was simple. How do you get skin to make collagen again?

Because that's what everything she tried missed.

•••

Then I found GHK-Cu.

It's a tiny copper peptide your body makes on its own. And your body makes less of it every year. By 60, about 60% less.

Those lab papers from France were about GHK-Cu. Researchers put it on skin cells and watched them start making collagen again.

It's tiny, so it can get into your skin, where collagen can't. And it doesn't burn like retinol.

The backs of your hands need it most. They get more sun than almost anywhere else on your body. The skin there is thin, with almost no padding under it. When the collagen there drops, the back of the hand turns loose and crepey.

Then I thought about Sherry.

Months of Vaseline. Every single night.

And every single morning, soft for an hour.

She was taking care of her hands. But nothing she used could get her skin making collagen again.

•••

Then I found the studies on women.

In one, presented to the American Academy of Dermatology in 2002, 71 women used a GHK-Cu cream on their faces for twelve weeks. Their skin got thicker and denser, and less loose.

In another small study from 1998, researchers had women rub GHK-Cu, vitamin C or prescription retinol into their thighs for a month. Then they took tiny skin samples and looked at them under a microscope to see how much new collagen was being made. It went up in 70% of the women using GHK-Cu. It was 50% for vitamin C, and 40% for the retinol.

These were small studies, and they were done on faces and legs, not hands. But I sat at my desk and realized what it meant.

This wasn't another moisturizer.

It was the thing Sherry's skin had been missing.

•••

So I went looking for it in something she could actually use on her hands. Hands get washed all day. It had to be rich enough to stay on, and something she could put on at night, the longest her hands ever go without soap.

I spent days going through Amazon and eBay. Most of what came up was cheap lotion with "copper" slapped on the label, or listings that didn't even show an ingredient list.

I wasn't going to hand any of that to a patient.

Then I came across Lanarie GHK-Cu Whipped Balm.

It was different. GHK-Cu was right there on the ingredient list. And it wasn't a thin serum. It was a rich balm, the kind that stays on your hands all night.

I ordered a jar that night.

It came a few days later. A small glass jar with a silver lid. The balm inside was whipped, almost like frosting, and a soft pale blue.

I rubbed some into the back of my hand at my desk. It looked thick, but it melted right in. It didn't sting. It didn't smell like anything.

I turned the jar over and read the label. GHK-Cu, whipped into shea butter, tallow and petrolatum. Petrolatum is what Vaseline is made of.

I thought about Sherry's nightstand.

It was the same kind of thing she'd been putting on her hands every night since June. Except this one had GHK-Cu in it.

I used it on my own hands every night for a few weeks.

Then I started recommending it to patients.

Sherry was the first.

•••

Here's what happened with Sherry.

Before she started, I asked her to take a picture of the back of her hand. Same lamp, same spot. That way, in eight weeks, we'd have something real to compare to.

She used it the first night, from the same spot on her nightstand where the Vaseline had lived since June.

Same nightstand. Same routine. Different jar.

The next morning, her hands were soft.

I'd warned her not to read into that. Soft in the morning is just the balm. The real change takes weeks, because her skin had to actually make new collagen.

She didn't say anything to anyone.

She just kept going.

It wasn't a miracle. Her hands were still 55. The veins were still there. But the crinkled look across the back was softer. It looked like skin again, not tissue paper.

That Friday, she booked a manicure.

The next week, her mom's ring came out of the jewelry box.

Her daughter noticed at dinner and asked what she'd changed.

She wasn't the only one.

•••

Let me be clear about what this is.

It's not a cure. Nobody has one for aging.

It won't give you the hands you had at 25.

And if you use it twice and leave it in a drawer, nothing will change.

Here's what it does.

It gives your skin the one thing lotion never did. A way to start making collagen again.

For my patients, that hasn't looked like a miracle. It's looked like this.

• Crepey by lunch turned into smoother, week after week.
• Checking their hands at every red light turned into forgetting to check.
• The rings came back out of the jewelry box.

That's the whole promise. For the women I treat, it was enough.

•••

Here's what I'd suggest.

• Keep wearing sunscreen on the backs of your hands.
• Keep moisturizing and stay hydrated.

Try it tonight.

Before you do, take a picture of your hand, same light, same angle. Put the balm on before bed, and look again in eight weeks.

Lanarie comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's enough time to give your skin the full eight to twelve weeks.

If your hands don't look different in your own photos after 90 days, send it back. Link below.