Wear your safety equipment – black Gloves are cool

Following on from an earlier post on dorky safety Glasses – the next easiest piece of safety protection to wear is a decent pair of gloves.

They can even make your live easier when working. Indeed it is this that has led me to wear gloves a lot recently, and while the gloves can make fiddly things a bit tougher the benefits outweigh those costs:

• Better grip: The right work gloves grip well – so you can apply more force where it is needed. The gloves’ extra grip mean that your will hands slip less often, reducing the amount of times your hands get hit.
• Protection: When you do hit your hands then the gloves dull the hit and importantly they will save you from getting cut.
• Cleanliness: When you are done your hands are clean – it’s a remarkable feeling. You can wash the gloves by leaving them on and washing your hands in the normal way.

To be fair you do need to get the right gloves, making sure they match the task at hand. I’ve been astonished at the variety of gloves available these days, and they are at very good prices. (check out your local handyman store.) There are tight fitting ones that actually make gripping fiddly things easier and heavy ones that keep you warm while working outside.

One friend lost the tip of his finger in a sawing accident – he could have been wearing gloves that could tolerate a brief encounter with a whirring blade and saved a finger. These ones are essentially a modern form of chain mail, and are bound to impress small children as well:

Another person I recently met lost a finger tip after getting pricked by a rose – I kid you not. It became infected quite some time after the incident and he

was lucky not to have died. These days there are gardening gloves specifically designed for handling thorns – and you can even get gauntlets and chest protectors for those in the thick of it. Imagine being able to prune roses and the like knowing that your hands will not be hurt – not that pruning roses is any particular love of mine. The gentleman I met said he was still pruning roses without gloves, as was the surgeon that removed his finger-tip. Both could save themselves some pain.