Did you know that your hands are more likely to tell your age than your face?

Well, it's true, unfortunately. Your hands often begin to show signs of damage years before your face. That skin is thinner and has less fatty cushion (plumpness) than the face, so it's more susceptible to damage and dehydration. If you think about your mother or your grandmother, the veins on the backs of their hands probably looked more prominent with bulged tendons and numerous brown spots. Because today's plastic surgeons cannot change the way hands are showing age, you can give your hands the careful attention they deserve with age-defying results.

Here are five reasons your hands may be looking older than you feel:

1. Exposure to sun, wind, and temperature extremes causes extrinsic aging - whether it's your face or your hands. These factors increase dryness, sometimes to the degree that cracks form on the sides of fingertips.

2. Too much sun is hard on hands because they often receive more intense and direct radiation than the face. Even in a car or near a window, hands are often exposed to sunshine. While some sun is good, constant overexposure causes it to grow thin, lose elasticity and increases the appearance of irregular pigmentation. Even if you apply sunscreen to the backs of your hands, it's likely to be rinsed off when washing hands.

3. It's also common to lose Vitamin C and other skin nutrients from our most "used and abused" skin on the body. Since our hands are being washed numerous times during the day, they're being stripped not only by water, but also by synthetic soaps and cleansers in commonly used inexpensive hand and dish-washing products. It's also important to avoid toxic anti-bacterial hand washes with alcohol and Triclosan. The Centers of Disease Control (CDC) states that these products don't work any better than regular hand washes or plain soap and water. Medical professionals are seeing regular use of these chemicals causing sores on hands that don't heal because the immune system barrier has been compromised.

4. Hands are usually the driest skin on the body. Yet, there's a bottle of hand and body lotion in almost every bathroom in America, right? Well, that lotion may not be doing the job - in fact, it may actually be dehydrating your skin. A recent study tested 50 of the most frequently purchased moisturizers - from inexpensive to costly - all of which contained various emulsifiers (ingredients that hold the oil and water together). The study found that ALL the moisturizers left skin more dehydrated within 2 hours than before application. Why? Because the emulsifiers didn't know to stop working when applied to the skin, so they bound up the oil and water around and inside each cell. Because the cell wall actually becomes weaker and weaker with each application of emulsified lotion, the moisture in the cells leaks (or weeps) out.

5. It's also possible that toxic ingredients in everyday products could be causing your hands to age. The following Red Flag ingredients should be avoided at all cost in ANY of your products:

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