At least once a week, a woman comes into the office, and she tells me she has a rash on her finger and she can’t get rid of it. She then shows me her hand, and it’s usually on the fourth finger, and it’s usually in the exact distribution of her wedding band—same size, same shape, it goes all the way around the finger and it’s a red, flaky rash. She tells me, “I made it go away with some cortisone cream that I bought over-the-counter, and then the rash just keeps coming back.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s her wedding ring or, for that matter, any other ring. The same problem will occur, because the real culprit here is soap and, it occurs because she is not taking her ring off when she washes her hands. When she washes her hands, some soap and water gets under her ring and it dries—day after day, time after time. She repeats that and the soap builds up under the ring. I promise you, if you take a bar of soap and you rub it up and down your skin all day long, every day, day after day, you’re going to get a rash where you’re rubbing that soap. The solution here is very simple. Take a new, stiff-bristle toothbrush and just scrub the inside of the ring with hot water, no soap, of course. Let it dry, take the ring to your jeweler and have them run it through the ultrasonic. That will get all of the soap residue off the inside of the ring. Then with either over-the-counter cortisone or a prescription cortisone, treat your finger. The rash will go away in 2 or 3 days as long as the ring isn’t’ there. Then you can re-introduce the ring which no longer has any soap residue, and I promise you the rash won’t come back unless, of course, you again don’t take your ring off when you wash your hands. So the solution to this problem is not to stop wearing the ring but rather to make sure that the inside of the ring doesn’t have any soap residue and it will be a very easy solution to a very vexing problem.
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