Getting below the surface: some fun facts about your skin (part one)

In this series, I’ll be delving into the extraordinary makeup of our skin. By the end of it, you’ll hopefully have 1) a greater appreciation of how hard your skin works to protect you, and 2) a greater desire to look after it in return.

PART ONE: SUPERPOWERS

I love skin more than Christopher Nolan loves non-linear film structures. 

And you know what? I don’t think we respect our skin enough. Not in physical terms - like sun damage - but emotional terms. We hurt its feelings. 

We’re always talking about our “amazing brains” that give us “consciousness”, or our “amazing hearts” that give us “life” - but we never talk about the awe-inspiring job our skin does. And I think we should, because it’s freaking AWESOME. 

What’s the Big Deal?

Skin is the largest and heaviest organ in the human body. It’s a complex tissue type tasked with the enormous job of protecting us from the harsh, dry and dangerous world outside our bodies, every day of our lives.  

This thin, tough, waterproof suit of armour which we call skin never takes a day off. It’s in a fight all day, every day to maintain its barrier. If we live to be 100 years old, that’s 36,500 days, half of which are in sunlight. Or to put it another way, we live in 18,250 full days of sunlight, 24/7, if we live to 100. Or 438,000 hours of sunlight over a 100-year life, nearly half a million hours. 

For that entire time, our skin keeps a body-weight-worth of wet, fragile, cellular human tissue alive and in perfect condition. 

Wow. Just wow. 

A Moment in Time

To make skin’s impossible task impossibler (this really should be a word), Australians are living longer than ever before. Furthermore, climate change and ozone layer depletion mean our skin is exposed to stronger UV solar damage for longer than ever before.

In an evolutionary sense, our skin types reflect our ancestral origins, and our expected life spans. The colder the area of origin, the paler the skin type. But our world has completely changed over the past 100 years, which in evolutionary terms is a blink of an eye. 

Now, people of all skin types live all over the world. People with pale skin types with origins in cold climates (and with pale skin designed to make as much vitamin D as possible with the limited sun exposure they received) now populate hot sunny countries with outdoor lifestyles. 

We are living in a perfect storm for our skin: more sun exposure, longer lives, and increased social and appearance importance that puts weight on youthfulness, anti-ageing and attractiveness of skin. 

So how on earth does skin tackle this ‘impossibler’ task?

Regenerative Superpowers

While your skin may not be able to rebuild itself at Wolverine-speeds (X-Men Wolverine, not the vicious little animals), it does have the unique ability to regenerate. 

Our epidermal skin cells make keratin, our outer waterproofing layer, and melanin which protects us from UV damage. Our dermal cells, fibroblasts, make collagen and elastin, our tough leathery layer. Our skin is full of immunologic cells which fight infection.

Skin cells are constantly being made, replacing old and damaged ones. New collagen and elastin are being made, replacing worn or degenerated tissue. 

Most of our tissue types do not have a high cell turnover, in fact, in some tissues, our cells last for life. But the skin is a factory of cellular regeneration and production of keratin, collagen and elastin. 

Amazing. But while your skin can regenerate, it still needs all the help it can get. The best time to start was years ago. The second best time is today. 

Stay tuned for part two where I’ll talk about the skin’s structure.