I cycle to work every day, but change out of my short sleeved t-shirt as soon as I get to the office. I would expect that 90% of the people at my company have never seen me in short sleeves ever. Even in the summer, I wear long sleeve dress shirts to work, the short sleeved ones don’t strike me as looking professional. With the AC and light, cotton fabrics I’m not uncomfortable either. It would never occur to me that anyone is trying to hide anything with long sleeves.
The idea that my asociates may be speculating that I do drugs or cut myself is a rather bizarre thought.
I wear long sleeves all the time. Some of my dresses are 3/4 sleeve, but I would prefer them full length. This is because I just like the look. Sometimes it holds more sex appeal to cover skin rather than to reveal it, especially the arms. It isn’t from feeling cold. There’s nothing wrong with my arms. They’re not cut, tracked, hairy, tattooed, port wined, or flawed in any way. I just like fabric on my arms. Once in a while, if the weather is warm, I’ll go out in a cami or a short-sleeved dress. The first time I went out in a cami, my friend exclaimed how happy she was to finally see my shoulders.
If I see another woman in long sleeves, my first thought is she has an interesting style sense like mine. Long sleeves can take on so many different forms, they afford more range of adornment for the body. They can be form-fitting all the way to the wrist, which is sexy. They can be loose and flowing, romantic. They can be cuffed and buttoned to go with a no-nonsense business suit. Bell sleeves are an old-fashioned romantic look which were the rage a couple years ago. Any of these sleeve designs can be made transparent. Traditional Chinese dance costumes sometimes include floor-length chiffon sleeves that form elegant swirls in the air when in motion.
In all honesty, I have a friend to whom both of these apply. On the modesty issue, she also never wears anything with even a remotely V neck. As for the short arms, one day (shamefully, not that long ago, and we have known one another twenty years) I asked her:
“Why do you always roll up your sleeves?”
She just stared at me and rolled her eyes, and has never let me live it down since.
I don’t assume they are “covering up” anything. I assume that they are more comfortable with long sleeves; it may be because they think it’s more professional, because it’s part of their uniform (many people that I see daily, I only see them in uniform), because they get cold easily, or because they don’t like their upper arms.
While I don’t always agree with “long sleeves are more professional”*, I really don’t much care what people wear so long as it’s not dangerous for themselves or others (as a shift manager once told a female engineer who liked flipflops and microskirts: “hey, I don’t care how you dress out of here, for me you may go naked - but I won’t have you distracting my guys, not when they’re handling explosives”).
I think for example that if you’re a consultant working with and not over your client’s employees, it produces better results and therefore it’s more professional to wear “blend in” clothes than “stick out” clothes.
Why not a nuke MM ? I wore short sleeves on rare occasions because most of the time we were reaching behind some blazing hot silver-painted steam pipe to get at some important valve. The sleeves served as an important insulator to keep one from leaving a few layers of crispy skin stuck to such silver piping.
To answer the OP, it would depend on the age and sex of the person.
I volunteer on a crisis line, so I speak with many people who cut, and almost all of them have been teenage girls, with the occasional woman in her 40s. Following this gross generalization, if the person is a young female I would wonder if she was into self-injury.
If it were a guy of any age I would figure that he was hiding tracks.
As one of those people who always wear long sleeves to work, it’s interesting to see what people might be thinking about me!
For me it’s just that I’m always cold. In fact, beyond the long-sleeved shirt that you see me wearing, I almost always have 2 more layers on underneath. I’ve found the only way to stay warm - especially in the summer when the AC’s on - is to follow the Three Layer Rule: always wear 3 layers of clothing to work.
But it’s good to know that there might be people here at work who think I have or had a drug problem!
I often wear long sleeves, and there are circumstances in which I ALWAYS wear them.
When I was young and crazy, I branded myself up and down the forearms with words and a name that were to me, at the time, all-encompassingly important. This was about 12 years ago, maybe 15. My parents haven’t seen my arms since. I’m all growed up now, so I don’t know why I hide them. I wear long sleeves on job interviews. I wear short sleeves at work - a retail environment. I wore long sleeves there for a long time, until it came up in conversation, and my boss asked to see. She thought that the scars on my arms were not an issue.
The other reason that I wear long sleeves is that I prefer the option of having them long or rolling them up. I also like the look and feel of rolled-up sleeves better than that of short.
I wear long sleeves a lot - mostly for buried reasons of modesty despite having practically lived in T-shirts during my collegiate years - go figure. More professional, perhaps, given that I work in the IT industry, lots of developers wandering around, etc.
That, and I’m one of the thinnest-blooded people in my office of 30+ people.
I think the key word is might. In reality, sleeve length rarely registers on my radar. If you asked me who prefers what type of sleeve in my office I would be hard pressed to answer
? I wore short sleeves on rare occasions because most of the time we were reaching behind some blazing hot silver-painted steam pipe to get at some important valve. The sleeves served as an important insulator to keep one from leaving a few layers of crispy skin stuck to such silver piping.