At war with my own skin: my life with eczema – and how I found the key to keeping it away

Beauty writer Anita Bhagwandas reflects on the lessons she has learned, from childhood to adulthood, about eczema – a condition that imposes daily physical and psychological tests

How do you scratch an itch that’s underneath your skin? The truth is, you can’t. At 15, I’d look down at my hands and see bubbles forming under the skin on my hands, becoming liquid-filled blisters that ached and itched until they popped. Grim, I know – and it didn’t get better as they healed; peeling the dressings off to change them was agony, while the claggy coldness of the wet wrap treatments is seared into my memory. What’s more, my now gauze-covered fingers were exactly the kicker my teenage self-esteem didn’t need.

My eczema, which is in its most basic terms a skin barrier malfunction as the result of genetics and environmental factors, began aged four. It was more rash-like then. I’d wonder why I was afflicted with it, and nobody else seemed to be. Kids would ask what it was, usually with mild disgust, which only made me feel ashamed. I had one ace up my sleeve though – my father was a dermatologistas . “We tried everything to heal and manage it, but the only big difference I saw was after rounds of homoeopathy,” he recalls, after it was recommended by an old medic friend of his. And it did work; until I hit my teens.