After ALL THESE YEARS!

In the winter I am plagued with dry skin.

(I just chugged a liter of water, because writing this reminded me that I rarely hydrate well enough this time of year. That's part of the problem.)

The heat, the cold, hot showers...everything leaves me itchy. So I lube up. Mostly the face, because it gets flaky. Same with my hands; they crack at the knuckles, also because of washing with soap. I'm not going to quit soap. I like soap. It smells nice and lathers up, and I envision the slippery mass of bubbles (or non-bubbly lubrication, depending on what I'm using to wash with) carrying away the dust and dirt I come into contact with over the day. Lotion does help; heavy-duty stuff for my hands (over the years it's been this or this or this or this), and lighter duty for my body.

The back, though. My poor, itchy back. I don't even wash my back; it gets bombarded by shampoo runoff, though, and I'm a stand-facing away-from-the-showerhead girl, so the back gets the hot water too.

In the past, I've had to look for, um, inventive ways to deal with this. I feel comfortable asking certain friends/family (Emily, Maria, Mom, Annie) to put lotion on me. But none of them lives with me, so it's not particularly sustainable. Former roommate the good very, very, very occasionally would help me out, but it made him uncomfortable, so I stopped asking unless it was killing me. I've asked around about what other people do. I've considered getting a washcloth on a stick, but it seemed messy and a waste of lotion, what with the loss due to absorption into the cloth. I finally settled on an odd baby oil application technique--in the shower I'll jet some baby oil onto my back while it's still pretty much wet and then rub the back against the shower wall to spread it all over as best I can, . (I'm not alone in this technique; one woman I talked to has a wall in her bathroom she has decreed the lotion-smearing wall. I thought my baby oil/shower combo was much less icky.) But my technique gets the towel kind of greasy, and oil has a nasty habit of making my already slippery shower a slip-and-fall hazard.

Today, my friends, I may have found the solution.

(Jesus, even talking about this has made my back itchy!)

I should have known that I'm not the only person who needs to rely on herself to relieve itchy dry skin that is not reachable in other ways. I don't know why it never occurred to me that something like this would exist.

Behold the lotion applicator. If you can get it at tar-zhay, I'm going to use my secret santa $10 gift card post holidays.

Relief at last is on the horizon.