I cat sat for several days and used the dish soap there to wash out the cat bowls and trays that are placed under bowl to food to keep crumbs off of the floor. It's what the cats are used to so I went with it. Anyway, her brand of dish soap is Palmolive, and now my hands are broken out because that variety of detergent has a coconut ingredient. I always buy Dawn because it doesn't cause this problem.

The little cracks that have formed on my fingertips (at the corner of the nails) is a common winter-time affliction if one is in water a lot, but these days I'm generally not. Every so often something comes along that reminds me that a particular product is a problem, and this episode was it.

Contact dermatitis to coconut is more common than food allergy
Coconut-derived products (such as coconut diethanolamide, cocamide sulphate, cocamide DEA, CDEA) can cause contact allergic dermatitis, present in cosmetics including some hair shampoos, moisturisers, soaps, cleansers and hand washing liquids. As with any contact dermatitis, an itchy blistering rash may arise a day or two after contact with the allergen, and take several days to resolve. If contact dermatitis to coconut products is suspected, then patch testing is an appropriate method for diagnosis. From here.

I am my own living "patch test." The list of coconut-derived products is really long, and there are dozens of different named chemicals that cause this problem (the biggest being sodium lauryl sulfate or sodium laureth sulfate).