Smith's Cremolia. The Old Ones Aren't Always the Best! (Other Hand and Nail Care)

Member Name: lamorna

Product:	Other Hand and Nail Care
Date:	21/07/02 (2594 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cheap, Softens, lasts

Disadvantages: The smell, Gloopiness, Sticky

As an underpaid, overworked hairdressing apprentice in the 1960s working in a smart Knightsbridge beauty-salon there’s nothing I don’t know about hand cream. Standing at a back-wash basin, shampooing up to sixty heads a day, six days a week it isn't surprising that my poor hands suffered badly.

We weren’t allowed to wear rubber gloves as the rubber pulled at the wet hair and made squeaky sounds, the clients didn’t like the apprentices wearing barrier cream as they imagined it made their precious hair greasy, so we endured the extreme damage done to our skin. My poor hands would scale up, crack, split, bleed, itch and feel like a reptile’s skin and look like it too as where the skin wasn’t bleeding it would be dingy and discoloured.

A date to the cinema with the latest new bloke meant wearing gloves, even in the summer months, as one touch of this rough textured skin in the dark would have them run a mile. The only treatment that really improved them was wearing cotton gloves and liberal amounts of pure rich and greasy lanolin to bed every night.

I can still see my dad look at me aghast when I was ready for bed in my long flannel nightie, a head full of rollers, bed socks and greasy cotton gloves and hear him say ‘Gawd only knows what you’re gonna do when you get married!’

Then, as now, hand creams were an essential part of my daily ritual. Some of the products still exist such as Vaseline Intensive Care, Nivea Cream and Smith’s Cremolia. Smith’s Cremolia? It sounds more like a tinned rice pudding doesn’t it?

I must have been in a nostalgic mood when I saw it on the shelf in Boots. It caught my eye because the packaging hasn’t changed since I last bought Smith’s Cremolia over thirty years ago. A clear glass jar with a black and gold label and a gold screw top. It was also ridiculously cheap, around the two pound mark, so I bought i
t.

Very little information on the label except a few ingredients including Paraffinum Liquidum which doesn’t sound very flash does it? Smith’s Cremolia is formulated and produced by Boots Skin Care Specialists. The label told me ‘Cremolia Softens and Conditions Hands and Skin. Non-greasy’

One sniff of the lemony, gloopy, opaque contents that looked a little like runny cake frosting and I was a fifteen year old in a blue nylon overall and Dr Scholl sandals bending over a back-wash and shampooing head after head as my poor hands stung, split and bled. It was a real deja-vu recollection of those teenage years.

Although it claims it’s non-greasy it feels sticky on application but this glueyness seems to disappear after a few moments of massaging. Smith’s Cremolia is in direct contrast to most hand care preparations with their creamy textures, pleasant perfume and instant absorbency.

However, it does soften and condition the hands but it isn’t a very pleasant experience. Another point I notice is that the level in the jar doesn’t seem to be going down. I do use it regularly throughout the day and the amount of the gloopy substance remains the same. Will I ever use it all up I wonder?

Would I recommend Smith’s Cremolia to you? Well, it is cheap, it does soften the skin, and it appears to last for ever but the smell is unattractive, the consistency is gloopy and that first sticky feeling on application is mildly unpleasant.

I consider it a basic every day hand care product, good to keep in the garden shed and use after a gardening session. Men would use it without thinking it was a girlie beauty preparation. It doesn’t make me feel pampered, groomed, cared for or special but it does take me back in time to those slave driving days of the ‘60s and my reptilian hands.

Summary: