by :Adam Sage, The Times

Want to know if you are a born leader? Or cut out to work alone? Or destined to be the pillar of your family? Then look at your hands. 

A wide palm would suggest that you will take your partner under your wing. Cold, moist hands mean you are ill-suited for positions of responsibility. Broad, long fingernails indicate a pragmatic nature. That, at least, is the theory of Jean de Bony, a French consultant who claims to have turned hand-reading into a tool for business management and for personal development. De Bony says he has analysed 10,000 hands — including those of 300 famous people, such as Nicolas Sarkozy, Karl Lagerfeld, Emmanuelle Béart, Céline Dion and Charlotte Rampling — to develop a system that gives him an insight into our make-up.

Hands, he says, are a window on our innate temperament, revealing our desire for power or for freedom, for company or for solitude, for novelty or for routine. You need only to understand them to understand yourself, de Bony tells me in his home town of Grenoble in the shadow of the French Alps.

His latest book, Ce Que Révèlent Vos Mains (What Your Hands Reveal), written with Stéphanie Leclair de Marco, a French journalist, claims that we can glean information from such factors as hand temperature, fingerprints, finger length and nail shape. For instance, a person whose fingerprint pattern forms a loop is likely to be sociable and adaptable, it says. A spiral indicates perfectionism and determination.

De Bony’s work is open to criticism. He has never published his studies, which have therefore never been validated by other researchers. 

Nor is he in contact with authors in the US and elsewhere who are seeking to give hand-reading a scientific basis. He argues that his research is unique.

In short, it is easy to see in him a modern version of Cheiro, the Irish palm-reader of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who claimed clairvoyance after learning his trade with an Indian guru. De Bony rejects the comparison angrily. Palm-reading is for charlatans

pretending they can predict the future, he says. His technique, which he calls biotypologie, is a factual assessment of the present, he claims. “I wanted to create something that was accessible and universal and that can be reproduced.”

He says that in France the main criticism facing him is not scientific but philosophical, with detractors arguing that we are the fruit of our environment rather than of our genes. They reject the notion that anyone could have a natural predisposition to lead or to follow, whether or not this is reflected in the hand.

“There is a form of paranoia about the innate in France,” he says. “When you speak to psychologists about this, they see red. They were formatted in the belief that we are a blank page upon which life will write. This is the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, where everyone is equal and everyone starts out with the same potential. I say that’s all very well, but find me a business leader with cold, wet hands. That doesn’t exist. I have being looking for one for 30 years.”

When de Bony first exposed his ideas on French television in the 1980s, there was fury. He received death threats and letters comparing him to Hitler for placing people in genetic categories. He and his wife fled to Canada to get away from the controversy.

Yet when he returned, he was taken seriously, at least by businesses. When La Mondiale, an insurer, wanted to reduce the turnover among its sales staff, for instance, it asked de Bony to conduct tests on job applicants. He told the company that sales people tended to have warm, moist hands, indicating that they enjoy a gamble and a challenge as well as a frequent change of environment. He said that if their fingerprints were loops, their natural instability would be reinforced. So he advised La Mondiale to take on people with spirals on their fingers because they have a “longer-term approach”.

 It did. He was also called to help a renewable-energy company that wanted to transform its engineers into sales staff. De Bony discovered that they all had cold, dry hands with fingerprints in the form of arches. “They were theoreticians. I told the boss that it was a bad idea [to ask them to find new business]. It would stress them and they would leave.”

Five new posts were created, and 15 candidates applied. All had hour-long interviews, but were unaware that the key moment came at the beginning when they were greeted by the gangling, black- haired man sitting in a corner of the room. “I was just there to shake their hands,” said de Bony. “We weren’t going to say thank you and

goodbye without giving them an interview, but in fact it was all over before they answered the questions because we were only going to retain those with warm, moist hands. They love finding new customers.”

He has stopped head-hunting (or hand-hunting, as it should perhaps be called) and instead holds seminars for businesses such as Chanel, the fashion house, Accor, the hotel group, and Bouygues, the construction giant. Staff are invited to analyse their hands, and the data is theoretically confidential. In practice, de Bony says, many employees use the findings to press their case for promotion, or indeed for staying in the same post.

“People will go to see the human resources manager and say: ‘Look, I’m not made to be a manager, so stop trying to give me managerial posts.’ It’s not that I’m trying to be awkward when I turn them down. It’s just my nature.”

What de Bony sees in your hands

How you cross your hands

Two thirds of men place their right index finger on their left when
they cross their hands, and two thirds of women do the opposite. Men who cross their hands like most women tend to trust their intuition and to be free of doubt. Women who cross their hands like men tend to be rational and in control of their feelings. A vast majority of senior politicians — be they men or women — cross their hands like most members of the opposite sex. Charles de Gaulle, for instance, crossed his hands like most women, and Margaret Thatcher like most men.

Fingerprints

An arch fingerprint pattern, found in 5 per cent of the world’s population, indicates loyalty, an individualistic nature and a sense of anticipation.

A loop fingerprint pattern, found in 60 per cent of the world’s population, shows that you are adaptable, responsive and sociable. An ellipse fingerprint pattern, found in 10 per cent of the world’s population, indicates a methodical mind, a need for security and a love of routine.

A spiral fingerprint pattern, found in 15 per cent of the world’s population, shows perfectionism, a tendency to want to protect other people and determination.


Palm shapes

Shape A Wide and square. A solid, pragmatic person who wants a
lasting relationship.

Shape B Narrow and square. An introspective temperament and a dreamer who wants to escape the daily routine without worries on the mind.


Fingernail shapes

Shape A Long and broad. Feet on the ground, pragmatic.

Shape B Long and narrow. A distant temperament more given to understanding one’s own feelings than to sharing them.

Shape C Short and wide. Passionate and emotional, driven by desires.

Shape D Short and narrow. Needs a safe, lasting relationship.

The hand readings are often ambiguous (your fingernails may say you are pragmatic, while your palms may say you are a dreamer). De Bony interprets this as a sign of a split temperament, which he says is frequent. He weights the answer on a scale of 0 to 20 to decide what is your dominant trait.