Reading the hand

Left hand or right hand: which one gets read?

Short answer: both, and they mean different things. Long answer below, including why the "left for women, right for men" rule you have read elsewhere is a Victorian invention with nothing behind it.

The working rule

In the tradition as it is practised now, the two hands are read as a pair, and the distinction is dominance:

• The passive hand — the one you do not write with — is read as what you arrived with. Inheritance, disposition, the material you were handed.
• The active hand — your dominant hand — is read as what you have made of it. Choices, direction, the accumulated shape of a life being lived.

The interesting reading is never one hand. It is the gap between them. A passive hand showing a long, curving heart line and an active hand showing a shorter, straighter one is a person who arrived open and learned not to be, and that is a reading worth having. Two identical hands are their own kind of statement.

The "left for women, right for men" rule

You will find this stated confidently across the internet and in a good many books. It has no basis in the working tradition, it contradicts the dominance rule that the same books use elsewhere, and it appears to be a Victorian tidy-up that stuck because it is easy to remember.

Ignore it. If you are left-handed, your left hand is your active hand, whatever else is true about you.

If you are only photographing one

Photograph your dominant hand. It carries the more legible creases in most people — the hand you use is the hand whose lines have been most deepened by use — and it is the one the tradition reads for where you are now, which is usually the question people actually have.

Ambidextrous, or genuinely unsure

Send both and say so. A reading that has been told "I use both" and reads accordingly is better than one that guesses. It is also one of the four things our intake asks, for exactly this reason.