Show Of Hands

Our hands tell a story. One that advances in aesthetic medicine now invite us to rewrite it.

- Liana Schaffner

I could have been a concert pianist. Even when I was young and my hands still had dimples, I was told that my long fingers were made to fly over piano keys, the way a seagull’s outstretched wings are made to ride a current of air. But my fingers are vexingly slow. They lack the speed and dexterity to finely chop an onion, much less master Chopin. Still, the idea that my hands had an air of virtuosity and untold potential made me a little vain about them – confident to the point of being unconcerned. I’ve never lavished attention on my hands. I can count on just one of them the number of salon manicures I’ve had. I don’t even wear my wedding ring because the plain, polished band feels too heavy and obtrusive. While I’ve subjected all other aspects of my appearance to intense scrutiny, my hands have escaped it. I simply let them be. And that allowed me to move toward an understanding of what it meant to feel beautiful. We’re told that beauty is about subtraction; to pour effort into it is to take away from it. My hands brought this hazy concept into high relief. Looking at them, I saw nothing to criticise, nothing to worry about, nothing to improve.

Now that I’ve reached the age of, say, a rather young president, I still think my hands are doing just fine. But I’ve been sent on a mission to investigate all the ways that our hands (and our impressions of them) shape-shift over time. So today, I’m sitting in dermatologist Dr Ranella Hirsch’s office. My hands are balanced over her palms in straight, parallel lines. She passes her thumbs over the backs of them, following the taut path of a tendon here, the blue branch of a blood vessel there. I feel anxious, as though I’m about to have my past divined and my fortune told. In a way, I am.