20 Incredible Facts about Your Skin

You’re going to be in your skin your whole life
So you might as well get comfortable with it

Want to get the skinny on your skin?

Yet don’t quite know where to begin?

Then these cool facts will soon have you loving the skin you’re in:

Facts About Skin

1. Skin is made up of 3 layers the epidermis, dermis and subcutaneous.
2. Your skin is only between 3 mm (0.10 inch) thick at its thickest.
3. Skin weight about 4 kg or 9 lbs, equaling 10% of your body weight.
4. Skin is the largest organ on the body, between 1.5-2.0 square metres (16 – 21 sq ft.) in total.
5. Skin is so much more than skin deep; it is thickest on the soles of the feet, 1.4 mm deep and thinnest around the eyes at 0.5 mm thick.
6. Unbelievably skin houses around 650 sweat glands, 20 blood vessels and around 1,000 nerve endings; now that is impressive.
7. The skin helps to retain water and essential body fluids, and electrolytes.
8. Skin is a protective barrier to harmful toxins, such as UV light, chemicals and foreign bodies.
9. One of the interesting facts about skin is that the colour is determined by a protein called melanin; this is a natural sun protection factor which helps shield us from harmful UVA rays.
10. Skin is covered in lipids or oils, which help to keep it soft and supple; astringent products such as soap and detergents can strip these lipids.
11. Melanocytes are the cells responsible for producing and distributing melanin around the body. We have roughly 60,000 melanocytes in our body. Still, it is not the colour of our skin that dictates the number of melanocytes; it has to do with the activity of these cells around the body.
12. Roughly 1 in 100,000 people suffer from the condition albinism, which is due to a lack of melanocytes.
13. Skin cools you with sweat when you’re hot and restricts blood supply to the extremities when cold.
14. The skin contains an unseen supportive network of fibres known as collagen and elastin, which act as mini shock absorbers.
15. Skin is a circuit board; how cool! Nerves transfer information and respond to different stimuli, continually passing information to the central nervous system.
16. The skin helps safeguard from potential injuries by having five different pain receptors.
17. The skin allows us to sense touch; these receptors are known as Messier corpuscles. They respond to the pressure of around 20 milligr, which is similar to a fly’s weightfly.
18. The skin contains its own mini exfoliation system, known as desquamation, helping to reveal shiny new skin underneath.
19. Skin sheds around 50 thousand cells every minute; over 50% of the dust in your home comes from the skin that has been shed.
20. Did you know staphylococcal bacteria cause boils; this bacteria can enter through the smallest incision in the skin and travel down the hair shaft to create an infection which becomes a boil.

To conclude. The naked truth

On a final note, if it’s random or gory facts about the skin you are after, here’s one; there are books at the Harvard law school that are bound in skin, which was either taken from the poor or stripped from criminals that were executed.

One of the volumes is called De Human Corporis Fabrica, which translated means, on the Fabric of the human body, how very apt.

Want to learn how to treat your skin correctly?

All of the Naked Chemist products are about listening to your skin and treating concerns that arise daily because your skin is constantly changing, so it can be treated like the dynamic organ it is.

Contact us here if you’d like to learn how to care for your skin.