Growing up our skin is prone to several changes through hormones. While for many of us, we seem to combat it, for others it can follow them into adulthood.
Florence Grace is a mum-of-two and a campaigns and marketing officer from Buckinghamshire. She has had eczema her whole life – it started when she was a baby and it has “never really gone away”.
For those who don’t know eczema is a skin condition that causes dry and itchy patches of skin. While it is common it isn’t contagious. There’s treatments available in pharmacists to help manage the condition but there isn’t a cure.
While Grace admitted there have been times that it’s been “more manageable than others” it has “always been there”. The mum-of-two said: “I had really bad asthma as a child, as well as being allergic to pet hair.
“When I’ve been looking into eczema causes before I heard that people with those two things often have eczema too, so I think they may all have been connected.
“Whilst I’ve grown out of my asthma and pet hair allergies, the eczema has stuck with me! Neither of my parents have eczema, but my younger sister does – and she also has asthma!”
Grace’s earliest memory of eczema was her “just itching and itching and itching my skin until it bled”. She added that she would almost zone out until she couldn’t “feel her hands”.
Grace explained that her hands would also be “damp and sticky with blood from where you have torn your skin apart”.
“It’s a very uncomfortable sensation but the itching is almost addictive,” she said. “I was back and forth to the doctors for much of my childhood due to my eczema several times as a child.”
Grace said she had been prescribed “several steroid creams over the years” and whilst they “sometimes, only sometimes, work at tackling the eczema in the moment, they certainly don’t prevent the eczema from coming back”.
“I have a mild reprieve from my eczema in my early 20’s but then it returned with a vengeance when I got pregnant”, she said.
Grace said the most aggressive flare up she had was on my hands just after she had her second baby, in May 2023.
She said: “Suddenly I was uncontrollably itching my hands for minutes at a time. They became red, sore, and dry looking and the skin on my hand literally peeled skin.
“Not only where they sore but they also came with something I had never had before – dozens of mini blisters were cropping up right in the middle of the eczema, on the palm of my hands and on my fingers.
“They would burst whenever I got into an itching frenzy, and this would cause them to get infected and then reappear. It was just horrendous.”
Grace explained that her eczema has only ever been in places you can’t including elbows, stomach and behind her knees.
She continued: “It was also so stressful having a newborn who wants to chew on your fingers etc and having to keep your hands away because they’re all sore and horrible.
“Even my three-year-old made comments about how horrible my hands looked, so I knew what everyone else was thinking even if they didn’t say it.
“I was trying anything, I could get my hands on to try and soothe my hand eczema but while a few things soothed it in the moment it would keep coming back and nothing was having an accumulative effect in dampening down the flare ups.
“I was on an endless search for something that I use on my hand eczema that didn’t contain steroids and which had a lot of independent reviews from eczema sufferers and that was when I discovered Hydrosil Turmeric Butter & Donkey Milk Salve.
“This product turned out to be ‘the one’ that I had been praying I would discover because not only did it work but it kept on working over time. I noticed a difference within a day of using it! This increased quite rapidly over the course of a week or so. up – this was the first product to do that! The blistering was the last to go but nothing else I had tried had cleared them except this salve, which did eventually get rid of them.”
Grace said the product stopped the itching “almost completely”. She continued: “I still had a bit of itching when I’ve been washing my hands a lot or been stressed but one quick application of the Hydrosil salve and the itching quickly gets under control and is completely gone within twelve hours”, she said.
“This is one of those products that’s a life changer for eczema sufferers like me, I can’t recommend it enough.”
