Hand Models

During her 30-year career in modeling, Ellen Sirot was everywhere. She was on billboards, in print ads, and in national TV commercials for brands like Coca-Cola, American Express, Avon, and Clorox.

SIROT: I did a lot of the early Apple phones. I did Citibank and all sorts of things that were 20 stories up and huge across Manhattan. You know, my husband’s watching a football game or something and then suddenly Papa John’s is there and there’s me.

But if you saw Sirot on the street, you wouldn’t recognize her. Because she never showed her face in any of her work.

SIROT: They called me Queen of the Close Up. The It of Cuticles. The Supermodel of Hands.

Until recently, Sirot was one of the nation’s top hand models. That might not sound like a serious job. But professionals like her play a prominent role in advertising.

SIROT: If you start paying attention, you see hands everywhere. You see hands on a lot of recipes, a lot of print ads, for jewelry or nail polishes. Commercials for food where the hands are in and out serving things. Nobody can have these picture perfect hands unless you’re taking care of your hands full-time. So a hand model always has to be called in if there’s a closeup. 

It’s a profession that requires flawless nailbeds, extreme maintenance routines, and some serious lifestyle adjustments. But for those who can cut it in the business, there is no shortage of well-paying gigs.

KORWIN: We work with beverage companies, we work with food companies, we work with watch companies, with jewelry companies, handbag companies. I tell everybody, if you need a hand, you know who to contact. And luckily, a lot of people do need hands.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: hand models.

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If you look at enough ads, you’ll notice that many of them feature isolated body parts. A makeup brand might show off its eyeliner with a closeup of a pair of eyes. A deodorant commercial might feature a well-manicured armpit. And a jeweler might show an elegant hand, fingers outstretched to showcase a $30,000 diamond ring. These faceless jobs are called parts modeling — as in, body parts. It’s a robust but lesser-known side of the modeling industry. And when a brand needs someone with just the right set of eyes, armpits, or hands, they often turn to one of the most powerful people in the trade.

KORWIN: My name is Dani Korwin, and I’m the managing director of Parts Models.

Korwin started her agency, Parts Models, in New York City back in 1986, after realizing that traditional modeling agencies often couldn’t fulfill an advertiser’s particular requests. Today, her agency represents around 200 models.

KORWIN: We’re talking about hands, legs, feet, facial features, lips or eyes — you know, whatever things that a client would need for a photoshoot. I would say we’re probably the stepchildren of the modeling industry because we’re the ones that people really don’t think about. But it’s a very, very, very important part of the modeling industry.

Korwin says there’s a demand for just about any body part you can imagine. But none more than hands.

KORWIN: If you start looking at magazines or TV commercials and you see the hands pointing to something or holding something or swiping something — bracelets, rings, bananas — I mean, anything!  All of a sudden you realize all the hands that are in advertising.

For Korwin, finding a great hand model is a challenge. Very few people have what it takes. But years ago, when Ellen Sirot walked into her office, Korwin knew she was in the presence of a star.

SIROT: I grew up dancing. But dance jobs generally are part time. So I was also waitressing and catering and doing all those sorts of things. She looked me over and she said to me, “You can be a foot model.” And so like the next day she called me and said, “Go to this audition for Dr. Scholl’s.” I went down and they looked at 50 pairs of feet. And it turned out I had really good feet. I had that nice sequential sweep down the toe line from the big toe all the way to the baby toe. And I had nice long toes that weren’t smushed at all. So I booked this Dr. Scholl’s job, and suddenly I was going from like $3 an hour as a waitress to $350 an hour as a foot model.

But Sirot soon realized that there were only so many advertisements featuring feet. The real money was in hands. So, she went back to Korwin to see if she had what it took.

SIROT: She said, “Go home and really take care of them for a while.” And so I had to figure out for myself how to clarify the skin, how to make the nails nice and strong and the cuticles really lay where they should and the nails growing well and being that nice, healthy pink, and the nice, healthy white of the moon.

The first requirement of being a hand model is having nice hands — exceptionally nice hands.

SIROT: You have to have beautiful skin tone. The fingers have to look beautiful in comparison to the base part of your hand. And you have to really have flawless skin and you have to have nails that really speak well — the pink has to show, the white has to show, they have to be strong, they have to grow well. Poreless, veinless, hairless. Kind of like they’re asleep — they’re like a sleeping beauty — just to look so beautiful without veins and without the bones popping up.

Those are basics that apply to all hopeful hand models. But Korwin says that, when it comes to aesthetics, different jobs call for different types of hands.

KORWIN: There are what we would term more “fashion hands” or more “commercial hands.” The fashion hands, I would say, would be a little bit more elegant — longer, leaner. The commercial types of hands are a little bit more you-and-me. The average viewer can look at that hand and relate to that hand. If you’re shooting a beer commercial, you want a hand that’s really representative of a baseball fan, a football fan. Or if you’re shooting a food product, somebody who’s used to being in the kitchen. “Yeah, that’s a hand I can relate to — that person really knows how to chop those onions!”

But Korwin says having good-looking hands is only half of the job. The other part is knowing how to properly showcase a product.

KORWIN: A good hand model will know, for example, how to hold a pen and not cover the logo on the pen. How to hold a bottle. How do you pour that liquid into a glass so it doesn’t splash everywhere?

A final photograph of a hand holding a pill in an ad might look simple enough. But if you were to zoom out, you’d see all kinds of contortions to set up that perfect shot.

SIROT: They’ll say, “Okay, this is a pharmaceutical — you’re going to be holding a Tylenol.” But you get there and it’s like, oh my gosh, to get into the position they need you to, you have to be hanging upside down with your hand backwards and being under the camera. You have to be able to sort of think upside down and backwards. You’re being asked to hold a position and then do little tiny micro-variations on that theme, so that they can get a million different looks and angles and so on. So that’s really much more about staying still and being able to do these little tiny manipulations. 

In the hand modeling world there are certain recurring poses that models have to master. For starters, the “sexy” hand pose.

SIROT: If you look through a bunch of hand model portfolios, there’s sort of like this graceful, kind of sexy look that all hand models can do really easily. It’s sort of a profile of one hand and you’re pulling the other hand down in a nice, really kind of sensual way.

And then, there’s the so-called “pizza pull” — the moment in a commercial for Domino’s or Papa John’s, where someone picks up a piece of pizza and it has that perfect cheesy resistance.

SIROT: Those are sometimes the hardest jobs, the pizza pull, because it’s all about the timing. So the food stylists are trying to get the cheese, just the right temperature. They’ll bring it to set and then they’ll be using the blowtorch to continue to make it just the right texture. And you have to swoop in and just so gently put your hand right underneath the crust and just beautifully place your thumb on it. And then you just luxuriously pull it so that it’s just getting that beautiful long stretch and then it just releases and you pull the pizza out of the shot and it’s perfect.

It might seem like a pretty sweet gig to be paid hundreds of dollars to hold up over-the-counter drugs and pizza slices. But the hand model’s job doesn’t end when they leave the shoot.

SIROT: You have to be committed to keeping them looking that nice all the time, which is a 24-hour-a-day job.

That’s coming up.

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In popular culture, hand modeling has often been the butt of jokes. In the movie Zoolander, a model keeps his prized hand inside a hyperbaric chamber to prevent aging. And in an episode of Seinfeld, an agent recruits George Costanza for his hands — which leads him to start wearing protective oven mitts.

KRAMER: Let me see your hands.

GEORGE: You can look at them — but do NOT touch them.

Ellen Sirot says there’s actually a little truth in this comedy.

SIROT: Any little thing can happen, right? A dog or cat or something can scratch you really easily. One little paper cut and you could lose a job.

Even though her hand modeling days are mostly behind her, Sirot still goes to great lengths to keep her hands in top shape.

SIROT: I wear gloves all the time. I’m no spring chicken, we could say, but my hands look 20, 25. These are hands that have never been in the sun since I was in my young 20s.

CROCKETT: Do people ever ask you why you’re wearing gloves, like, at the grocery store?

SIROT: Like a thousand times a day, so I’m very used to it. People either think I’m a germaphobe or I’m, you know, maybe a little crazy.

And she exercises extreme caution when it comes to routine daily tasks.

SIROT: I’m careful around sharp knives, I’m careful around boiling water. I’m careful around fire. I’m careful around the things like wine glasses breaking. That’s a big one. I only use stemless wine glasses. I had a baby in the middle of my hand modeling career. All the bathing and stuff like that, my husband did most of that.

In the event that something ever did happen to them, Sirot’s hands were protected by an insurance policy.

SIROT: I did have Lloyd’s of London for a while. It was like $1 million or something. So, yeah, if I lost my hand, I was going to be able to use that insurance.

If a hand model is willing to put in all of this time and work, they can see a pretty good payoff.

SIROT: Different jobs, you can get paid radically differently. The lower-level jobs are usually working for the magazines — say, $150 for a day and your day could be ten hours, right? You’re there all day, you don’t get paid too much, but you get these beautiful photographs. So that’s really where all new hand models usually have to start, that lower level, and build up their portfolio. And then from there you could do things like catalogs or pharmaceuticals where you might be getting paid $150 an hour or $200 an hour. And then it goes up from there to like $250 or $350 for big advertising campaigns. 

Working in video can be even more lucrative. Many serious hand models are members of SAG-AFTRA, a labor union that represents entertainers. For a filmed commercial, their rate is set at around $650 dollars for an 8-hour day on set. But a brand might end up using the footage in multiple commercials — and when they do, the model gets paid the day rate for each use.

SIROT: You could be doing the same shot that they’re going to use in six different commercials and suddenly you’re getting six times your day rate just for one day. Some hand models were buying cars and buying houses with all the TV jobs that were going on.

Hand models enjoy another financial advantage. Models who show their faces in ads often have to sign exclusive deals. If they work for one cologne brand, they have to agree not to work with any competitors. But a hand model isn’t bound by the same rules.

SIROT: I could be doing Burger King one day and McDonald’s the next day.

CROCKETT: So, Burger King never saw your hand in an ad and said, “Ugh, Ellen double crossed us!”?

SIROT: No. Most people can’t recognize hands from commercial to commercial.

Dani Korwin, the hand model agent, makes money by taking a cut of each job her models book — 10 percent for video work, and 20 percent for print. But she’s quick to say that, even though hand models are paid well, most of them don’t earn a full-time living from hand work alone.

KORWIN: It’s not a 9-to-5 job and it’s not a five day a week job. So the jobs come in day by day. I mean, there are times when it’s very busy and the model could be very busy. And there are times when you’re basically staring at the wall. I find that a lot of models do supplement their income.

SIROT: There’s very few hand models who actually make a full time living as hand models. Our joke is, like, “You can count them on one hand,” right? 

But, if you can manage to be the Queen of the Close Up? The It of Cuticles? The Supermodel of Hands? Well, you just might be an exception.

SIROT: There’s probably five women and there’s five men who may not do anything else except hand modeling. 

CROCKETT: And you were right in there. 

SIROT: Yeah, I was the queen of the tiny handful.

CROCKETT: At the peak of the demand for your hand modeling career, were you making, like, a doctor or a lawyer salary?

SIROT: Not quite. But probably upper management. Like, low six figures. I mean, considering I had been a dancer, I was making a lot.

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For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett. This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson.

CROCKETT: Do you  ever scout people in public for their hands?

KORWIN: I really have enough people coming to us that I don’t have to go out on the street and say, “Hey, wait a minute, have you ever thought about being a hand model?”