Even in summer, Antarctica is breathtakingly dry. Friends that have gone to the Pole* describe it as “ten times drier than McMurdo”, which is a little hard to grasp – while the winter has gotten drier than it was over the summer, it’s always really dry.
Weird things happen. I understand the purpose of body lotion. There’s weird dry patches on my legs. The first few weeks were non-stop chapstick (which has since equaled out) and my problematic face-hide took a lot of reworking on the skin care routine to make something that was even passable.
I’ve got a huge bottle** of hospital-grade body lotion (Hypoallergenic! Doesn’t smell like much!) which has made the biggest difference, and a humidifier I run when I’m in my room. Hang-drying laundry in my room also goes a long way to humidify the air (and my flannel-lined pants are usually dry in 6-8 hours).
And of course, the ubiquitous nalgene bottle: I used one of the cheapy Target metal ones in the States (It slices! It dices! It survives being dropped off an aerial!***) but eventually broke down and bought one of the Antarctica-cool ones from the store. It took getting a special top off of Amazon for me to stop dumping water out of the bottle’s wide mouth onto my face, but now it’s pretty much my favorite thing.
Nalgene bottles are an important part of Culture here: they are where you put your stickers that you trade with other people.
Anyway, something actually interesting: while everyone experienced different things with the initial dryness, I lost my fingerprints.
I have a phone with a back-placed fingerprint scanner and usually unlock it while I’m pulling my phone out of my pocket. I noticed one day I was having trouble unlocking it, and eventually I couldn’t fingerprint-unlock it at all. My fingerprints had just worn off my fingertips.
It took several months, but they grew back sometime in January. And then earlier this week I took off my gloves while pumping fuel, got a little bit of cold exposure to the hands, and now they’re gone again.
Weird.
*Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, specifically.
**”When are you ever going to use that much lotion?”
“I’m staying for winter.”
“Oh, never mind. Are you sure you have enough?”
***I have never even taken my water bottle up an aerial and am reasonably certain falling any sort of distance could easily destroy the bottle, but it has been both reasonably durable and easy to clean.
Book and Ladder 
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