Once you identify the four basic types and the three modalities, the real skill to reading hands is learning to judge hands. That takes practice. Learning to use your natural intuition is vital to getting the “big picture” first. When judging the qualities of hands, it helps to think of extremes. The texture of a person’s skin can range from the velvety softness of a baby’s butt to the calloused coarseness of coal miner’s hands. You’ll seldom see contrary qualities together in the same hands. People with opposite qualities rarely have much to do with one another. Debutantes don’t dine with ditch diggers.

No two hands are alike. Notice the difference between your own two hands. The hand you normally write with is your dominant or conscious hand. It reveals what you’ve done and are likely to do with your talents and challenges. The other hand is your unconscious mind. It reveals what potentials you were born with.

Whether a person’s basic skin type is whitish, brownish, reddish, or yellowish, palms still contain varying colors. Rosy-pink is healthiest. It’s frequently found in the ball of the thumb and beneath the index finger. Red color can mean too much energy, passion, anger, or rage. White is the opposite extreme and usually denotes a coolness or lack of energy and ardency. Hands and fingers can be extremely flexible, bending back at every joint. They can also be so stiff that you can’t budge them with a nutcracker. Who do you think is more stubborn? Healthy skin is elastic. It quickly bounces back when pulled and pushed. If the consistency and elasticity of skin stays indented after squeezing, that person needs more physical exercise to build physical and psychological resistance to life’s knocks. A handshake can vary from cold damp mashed potatoes that reveal apathy, to a rough, hard, hot, dry vice grip that asserts dominance.

Classifying the thumb and observing the finger proportions and qualities in general is very important. Fingers can be long or short, smooth or knotty, and have tips that are pointed, conical, round, square, or spatulate in shape. Are your individual fingertips shaped similarly or differently? Are your fingers straight or twisted? Are they spread widely or held closely together? How flexible are your fingers and each joint individually? Observe the proportions of individual phalanges (space between joints) in relationship to each other. Does one appear long or short or fat or thin in comparison to the others?  Each finger has very specific meanings that are colored by hand type and by the individual qualities of fingers. These will be discussed in future blog entries.