If you start using chemicals that you really want to keep your hands out of (e.g., silver nitrate, amidol, pyro, sodium hydroxide), wearing gloves becomes second nature, and you stop worrying about the cost of changing them several times in a darkroom session, because they aren't that expensive in the context of the other things you're doing, so now I wear nitrile gloves for all sorts of reasons, particularly whenever I'm handling sheet film, and I don't get fingerprints on my film anymore, and my hands don't smell like fixer. Occasionally I'll have some sort of accident, like a sheet of film getting lost in a deep tank (usually because I'm doing something unorthodox, like using the rack from a Yankee tank in a 5x7" tank line), that necessitates immersing my hands in the chemicals, but it's more the exception than the rule these days.
