La Roche-Posay Cicaplast Mains Review

Every winter, my hands get incredibly dry. So dry in fact, that they crack up and bleed. A lot.

(I was considering adding a "Before" picture to this post, but decided against it, since I do not want to subject my readers to the mess that is my hands, so you will just have to take my word for them having been in a really, really bad state!)

Because of this, I have tried a lot of hand creams over the years, and while some of them have been significantly better than others, none of them really cured the problem completely.

My local pharmacy started carrying the great French drugstore brand La Roche-Posay recently (yay!!), however, and since I had been incredibly happy with the only La Roche-Posay products I had tried up until now (read my reviews of those here, in order to see why I liked them so much), I picked up not only the Effaclar Foaming Cleanser I have been using for quite some time now to clean my face, but also a new product, their Cicaplast Mains hand cream. This hand cream appealed to me since it was said to fit damaged hands. And what are my hands if not damaged?

I did not have very high hopes for the hand cream, to be honest, as I had been using other hand creams for months in order to make them less dry, and nothing seemed to help. And the first time I put some Cicaplast Mains on, I was not too thrilled either. There was no cool scent, like some other hand creams have, instead this was a very neutral product, like all other La Roche-Posay products I have tried up until now.

I also immediately felt some stinging when I put the hand cream on, which was not all that nice (later I did remember, however, that I experienced the same kind of stinging with the La Roche-Posay Substiane eye cream, so maybe this is something that a lot of La Roche-Posay products do?). In fact, my hands turned quite red, and heated up, for some reason, so I honestly started worrying that I might have had an allergic reaction to the cream or something.

I also did feel that the cream was rather greasy, and did not absorb very fast, a pet peeve of mine with hand creams.

So I basically thought the Cicaplast Mains was a waste of money, and then went to sleep, having put the cream on right before bedtime.

So imagine my surprise in the morning when I noticed a significant improvement on my hands! Nothing else had worked, even if I had applied creams multiple times a day, but the Cicaplast Mains had made my hands look pretty good! So this cream must be doing something right!

This is why I decided to put it on the next evening as well, again, right before bedtime, since the cream does make your hands very greasy, like I mentioned, so I cannot put this on when I still have other things to do. And the next morning: my hands were completely "healed"! I could not believe it! No other hand cream has ever come close to this, making me completely flabbergasted regarding how the French do this. But who cares, as long as it works, right?

I do think, however, that this hand cream has some downsides (mainly the long time it takes for it to absorb and the greasiness), so I think I would mostly recommend it for those who have severe issues with dryness etc., not just your "average hand cream user". But if your hands get really, really dry like mine, this cream can surely be a true lifesaver!