Neutrogena's Norwegian Formula hand cream is a heavy-duty moisturising lotion, said to have been formulated for use by - well, Norwegian fishermen, whose job, that entails working with sea-water in often Arctic conditions, renders their hands susceptible to all-round heavy-duty chapping and roughening. They need something really special to help soften and heal their hands, and this lotion is apparently it.

In British supermarkets and chemists throughout the land, Norwegian Formula is widely available in a 50ml, crimp-sealed little plastic container for around the £3.20 a tube mark. They have distinctive wide-based lids so they can be stood up on the caps, and there are two varieties, unperfumed, which comes in a red-screw-topped tube, and the fragranced blue-lidded variety which smells faintly and generically sweetish (but not to my taste at all). £3 for a miniscule 50ml of hand lotion might seem quite expensive but Norwegian Formula's unique selling point is that you never have to use very much of it: the exit-hole on the tube is tiny - only a couple of millimetres across so that the cream, which is very thick (almost as thick as toothpaste) emerges from the tube in a very thin stream. Notionally, you only need about a half-inch long squidge of it to moisturize both hands, so reputedly, a 50ml tube contains up to 200 applications! The lotion is a slightly translucent / opaque whitish colour and though it's very fat-like in appearance to begin with, it's totally non-greasy when it's rubbed onto your hands.

Norwegian Formula hand cream has been around for a while, and back in the 1980s, when I was in my late teens and first discovered it (through my mother) I was - naively - a bit leery about using the stuff as I assumed it was a Norwegian product, and at the time I was actively trying to boycott products made in Norway because of that country's stance on the issue of commercial whaling. (Boycotting products made by countries that support the resumption of commercial whaling turns out to be dead easy if it's just Norway you're discriminating against: in fact things only really start to get tricky when you bring Japanese exports into the mix....)

Actually, Norwegian Formula hand cream is made by Johnson and Johnson and isn't a product of Norway at all, so the Norwegian flag shown on the front of the tube, and the story about the fishermen, that's presumably, all just marketing blurb.

Since I was very young, I've always had skin on the back of my hands that (charmingly) tends to split over the knuckles into a network of fine and bleeding cracks in cold and dry weather if I don't use some kind of heavy-duty hand moisturiser as a matter of course. If I don't moisturize and that happens, I find Norwegian Formula is an excellent remedy that is pretty effective softening and even helping heal the rough skin after even one application: to keep the problem at bay I find if I use Norwegian Formula regularly, once a day on my hands say, before I go to bed it tends to be enough.

The main drawback I find with this product is that due to the thickness of the lotion, and the fact that you don't get all that much in the packet to begin with, it's difficult to tell when it's running out. Especially since vigorous squeezing of a apparently, near-empty tube of Norwegian Formula will yield enough of the lotion (especially since in practice, you need so little of it) to moisturize your hands - and I find you can go on for a week or two, squeezing your nearly-depleted tube but still getting enough to do the job that you put off and put off buying more of the stuff (as I would say it's quite expensive). It's also best, to get the full moisturizing effect, to apply it only when your hands are properly dry. If there's any water on your hands, the lotion goes on more smoothly but gets diluted so it doesn't work as effectively.

These are minor points however. I would say that the lotion is a brilliant product that does an excellent job to softening even 'heavy duty' rough skin. I wouldn't be without this, especially in winter.