The pressure on musicians to take care of their hands is subtle but pervasive. I was always a singer, so even though I played the piano (badly and never, EVER in public), I never thought about my hands... until I became a conductor. Knowing that my hands were suddenly the only part of me that really mattered -- with the choir and/or orchestra was depending on my hands to tell them what to do and when, and the audience, when they paid attention to me at all, noticing only what my hands were doing -- I became conscious of them quickly. Out went the garish nail polish (which I love) and the occasional nail-biting and the scraggly-looking cuticles; in came the obsession with hand lotion, lol. I'm glad to be done with conducting, if only because all that attention to the appearance of my hands was so annoying! :-p