Which hand should you read
Every reader is asked this within the first minute, and every book answers it differently. Here is the plain version: you read both hands, and you read them against each other. The answer is in the difference.
The old rule
The older books give a rule by sex: the left hand for a woman, the right for a man. It is neat, it is easy to remember, and it survives mostly because it is neat. You will still meet readers at fairs who use nothing else, and they read perfectly well — because in practice they look at the other hand anyway.
The rule most readers use now
The modern rule is about which hand you use, not who you are. Your non-dominant hand — the one you do not write with — is read as the hand you were given: temperament, inheritance, the shape of things before you had any say in them. Your dominant hand is read as the hand you have used: what you decided, practised and became.
This is the more useful rule for a simple reason. The dominant hand genuinely changes over a life. Lines deepen where a habit hardens; the small lines multiply in a difficult decade and fade in an easy one. The passive hand changes far less. So the two palms give you a before and an after, and no other pair of readings does.
The hand you were given is the question. The hand you use is the answer.
What to compare first
Take the three long lines in turn and hold one hand beside the other. The heart line, beneath the fingers: is it longer, straighter, more broken on one side? The head line, crossing the middle: does one hand carry it further? The life line, curving round the thumb: is the curve wider on the hand you write with?
A heart line clearer on the dominant hand is read as someone who learned to say what they feel. A head line longer on the dominant hand is read as a mind that was trained rather than inherited. A wider life line curve on the dominant hand is read as a life that opened up — more room, more people, more risk taken than the starting hand promised.
When the hands barely differ
Hands that are near copies of each other are read as a life close to its original terms: the same town, the same trade, the same temperament as the family. That is not a small life. The old readers considered matched hands a sign of a settled nature, and envied it more often than not.
How to look at your own
Relax both hands rather than stretching them, and hold them under the same warm light — a lamp is better than a window, and far better than a phone torch. Photograph the left, then the right, from the same distance, so that you are comparing like with like. Then read the passive hand first, in full, before you let yourself look at the other. It is very hard to see what you started with once you have been told what you became.
And take it lightly. A palm is a map of habits, not of years to come.
Questions people ask
Which hand do you read for palmistry?
Read both. The hand you write with shows the life you have made; the other shows what you started with. The difference between them is the reading.
Is the left hand read for women and the right for men?
That is the old rule, and many readers still use it. Most modern readers use the dominant hand instead, because handedness explains the difference between the palms better than sex does.
What if my two hands look completely different?
That is read as a life that moved a long way from where it began — by choice or by circumstance. Hands that match closely are read as a life lived near its starting terms.
Have both hands read
Photograph one palm, then the other, and compare what she finds.