Why is the outer layer of skin on my left index finger dying and peeling off every few months?

This happens to me when I go fly fishing, if that helps. The 'old' skin is really rough, dry and peels off in areas at a time. I chalked it up to getting wet and drying out frequently. I never really treated it beyond moisturizing more than I did before (as in never) and I haven't really had it happen again for awhile now.

I had something similar on my arm. After about 18 months of not clearing up I finally made an appointment with a dermatologist who said it was Actinic Keratosis. He liquid-nitrogen-ed the area in the same appointment and that was that.

Your skin is always dying and flaking off but usually it does it a little bit at a time, not all in one throw. I've had things like this once or twice but I just kind of shrugged and ignored it at the time. Now I'm kind of wondering, based on what Kookwon said, if there isn't some combination of lack of moisture (at least one of my episodes flew in formation with my cleaning a bunch of parts with an acetone) and the sort of activity that might, normally, encourage the formation of callouses. That's just a wild guess though.

Do you do anything with that part that you don't do with other parts? Think about how you grip your steering wheel, video game controller, phone, razor, that sort of thing that you handle regularly - could it be mechanical abrasion of the area? Do you apply a chemical that gets on it somehow - eg polishing silver while holding the silver piece in that hand, that sort of thing?

I had something like this between two fingers last winter. It looked pretty much identical. A doctor diagnosed it as athlete's foot (yup, gross) caused by sweaty gloves I used for cycling, etc. I used an antifungal cream and washed my gloves more frequently and it went away after a few weeks.

I can speak extensively on this, if you'd like, but your pics look exactly like what happens to me. In Junior High and High School I would go through extreme bouts - my entire index/middle fingers, sometimes thumbs, and even ring fingers would randomly peel. If it's particularly bad, the skin (after the peel) would remain dry and crack open in various spaces. This happened every few months, every sixths months, or every few years, with seemingly no pattern (or cause) that I could discern. I would wear cotton gloves to bed with my hands lathered in cream. It never really seemed to help that much, but maybe I was impatient? The beginning phase was always a "warmness" on that area of skin, with the appearance of bumps (like braille, sort of) that always reminded me a bit of poison oak or hives or .. something like that. Mild sense of itchiness, too, but nothing that really bothered me or slowed me down. A day or two after the bumps/bubbles, the skin starts to peel. If you help it along, you're likely to expose some more "fresh" skin which may not be super comfortable for a bit (like pulling off a hangnail), but I assume you've figured that out by now. Now that I'm in my 30s, I can barely remember the last time it happened, but it just happened again this week. Very low-grade example, only around/near the webbing between my index, middle, and ring fingers (on one hand only). Sorry I can't give you any suggests. I've just lived with it (for ~20 years). I hardly notice it anymore, but it's nothing like it was when I was in my early teens.

I've had this happen too, and I vaguely remember it possibly being attributed to some sort of virus. Googling relevant terms didn't bring up anything, though

Do you take antibiotics on a recurrent basis? I once had peeling skin on my fingers that I eventually found out was a side effect of an oral antibiotic... keflex I think.

Do you use soap with Triclosan in it? Stop for a while- it causes that in some people. Same thing with lotions containing oatmeal.