In reply to featuresforfeet:
I've recently decided that my skin's grip is mostly based on the weather. Yesterday, I was in Kleinwalsertal, Austria, and I could basically skin straight up. A week ago, I was somewhere more to the East and I was having a terrible time of it.
(All things are relative, of course. On yesterday's tour, one bloke in front of me (in another party) had deployed his ski-crampons and I'm really not sure what that was about because they certainly weren't needed.)