Do you ever sit there and just wonder about your skin? Like what is it made of? Or what is its exact purpose? In this article, you’ll learn the general facts about your skin and some of these facts just might surprise you. For a lot of people, they might know that our skin is to protect our inner body, or that it might can be damaging to constantly be exposed to the sun. There is so much more to our skin that meets the eye and you’re about to find out what that is.
Before we get into the general facts about your skin, its important to know a little more about what your skin is. Your skin is the thin layer of tissue forming the natural outer covering of the body of a person or animal. It is what generally protects the insides of our bodies from environmental impacts. But as I already mentioned there is so much more to our skin that meets the eye. Our bodies are complex structures and what’s even more complex than what you realize is the skin that your in. Keep reading on to find out some great facts about your skin!
What Are Some Facts About Your Skin?
Listed below are some general facts about your skin, you may know some already and some you may just be completely shocked by.
- It’s your body’s largest organ.
- An average adult’s skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.
- The skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The areas that don’t sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, and the eardrums.
- Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat – a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals and anus.
- The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.
- Breasts are a modified form of the aprocrine sweat gland.
- Fetuses don’t develop fingerprints until three month’s gestation.
- Some people never develop fingerprints. Two rare genetic defects, known as Naegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentoas reticularis, can leave carriers without any identifying ridges on their skin.
- Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects.
- Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. You skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.
- There are a least five types of receptors in the skin that respond to pain and to touch.
- One experiment revealed that touch receptors that are concentrated in the fingertips and palms, lips, and tongue, nipples, penis and clitoris – respond to a pressure of just 20 milligrams, the weight of a fly.
- In blind people, the brain’s visual cortex is rewired to respond to stimuli received through touch and hearing, so they literally “see” the world by touch and sound.
- White people appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climates and lost much of their melanin pigment.
- More than 2,000 people have radio frequency identification chips or RFID tags, inserted under their skin. The tags can provide access to medical information, log on to computers or unlock car doors.