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

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. Today we’re talking about how skin is ‘built different’.

 

PART TWO: ‘BUILT DIFFERENT’

 

Your Skin Has Thick Skin

Alongside its regenerative abilities, our skin’s structure is quite extraordinary. If you don’t believe me, just remember that leather - one the most flexible and durable natural materials throughout history, is skin. And yes, during dark historic times, human skin. Sorry. 

Working from the inside out, our skin begins from the outer layer of our muscles and bones where there is a dense springy mesh of fibrous connective tissue, made of billions of little cotton-like fibres, which are packed with little balls of fat cells. This creates a thick layer of subcutaneous fat which both pads and insulates us. 

 

The Dermis

Next up we have the dermis - a thick fibrous layer that adapts to whatever is needed. 

As Casey Affleck’s character in Good Will Hunting would say, the dermis is “wicked smart”. The dermis attaches to the billions of little fibrous threads, called connective tissue, which attach our outer layer to the muscles and bones. 

Most of the thickness of the outer layer of our skin is dermis, and it works hand in glove with our epidermis - which I’ll get to in a minnie. 

Structurally, the dermis is more fibrous than cellular. The cells of the dermis are called fibroblasts, and these cells are basically collagen and elastin factories. Virtually the entire content of our dermis is a thick weave of collagen and elastin threads, made by the fibroblasts, which densely weave together in an elastic mat. Elastin fibres look like little springs when viewed under the microscope, which is extra cool when you remember that they make our dermis tight and elastic.

The thickness of the dermis is adaptable. On our back, it can be up to 7mm thick - sort of like cowhide (yee-haw). Around our eyelids, it’s less than 1mm thick, like paper. 

Dermal ageing occurs through the thinning of the collagen layer and weakening of the elastic fibres. Sun damage creates powerful injury to the dermis, a condition called solar elastosis, which is largely irreversible and happens because UV light damages the DNA of the cells. 

 

 

The Epidermis

A bit more anatomy is needed now - but bear with me. The dermis has a blood supply, a nerve supply and a lymphatic drainage system. The fibroblasts can get all their nutrition via the bloodstream. They don’t need lotions applied. They just need to be protected from the attack of the sun. 

The epidermis is different. It’s our very outer layer - our front line to the action-packed world. 

Structurally, the epidermis is thin and almost completely cellular. Between the dermis and epidermis is a critical layer called the basal lamina, which basically velcros the fragile cellular epidermis to the dermis. 

 

 

No blood vessels penetrate the basal lamina, meaning the epidermis is the only tissue in the human body that has no direct blood supply! Crazy stuff. 

So what does this mean? Basically, any nutrition coming from inside the body (through the bloodstream) to the epidermis needs to diffuse through the upper dermis and then through the basal lamina before it can get to the active epidermal cells. 

Now, like all high-performance machines, the epidermal cells need fuel to keep protecting and regenerating our outer layer, but the fuel has to travel from some distance away.

While this seems counterintuitive from a nutritional point of view, it’s an evolutionary compromise to keep our skin tough enough to withstand the constant trauma from our hostile environment. If it wasn’t built this way, we’d bleed every time we touched something. So our bodies have put the spongy blood supply as close as possible to the epidermis, just beneath the surface of the skin, while maintaining our ‘hard shell’. 

 

The Reason I’m Telling You All This

The entire logic of active skincare is that absorption into the cell of additional nutritional elements will improve the function of the cell - and there is proof that it does. So in addition to good general health and good sun protection, regular use of active skincare really is one of the best things you can do to maintain your best skin for life. 

My Angry Doctor skincare has been formulated carefully to ensure that nutrition reaches the right cells in a way that is highly effective and nice to use. 

Simple. And now that you’ve been reminded of what your skin does for you, perhaps it’s time you returned the favour and did something nice for it.