The skin is your body’s largest organ and protects you from everything under the sun, but how much do you really know about the role it plays in your health?
The skin of your body plays a vital role in regulating your temperature, protecting your bones, muscles, and internal organs, detecting hot from cold, and keeping infection and disease at bay. But, that is just the basics. There are so many things about your skin than you know. Here are some amazing facts about your skin that you probably are not aware of:
The person’s skin, when off the body, can cover an area of 2sq meters.
A full-grown adult has about 21sq feet of skin. It has more than 11 miles of blood vessels, and
weighs about 9 lbs.
Your skin accounts for around 15% of your total body weight.
A person’s skin renews itself in about every twenty-eight days.
An average adult has around 300 million skin cells.
A single square inch of skin contains up to 300 sweat glands and about 19 million cells.
The skin of your feet, which is 1.4mm, is the thickest in your body.
The skin on your eyelids, which is 0.2mm, is the thinnest in your body.
Your skin is constantly shedding dead cells – even around 30,000 to 40,000 cells every sixty seconds! That’s about 9 pounds per year!
It is said that more than half of the dust that accumulates in your home is in reality dead skin.
About a billion tons of dust in the Earth’s atmosphere is made up of dead skin.
A person’s skin houses more than one thousand species of bacteria.
Skin that has been damaged tries to heal itself by creating scar tissue. This is different from the skin tissue people generally have because it lacks sweat glands and hair.
The skin has at least 5 different types of receptors. These are responsible for responding to touch and pain.
Skin forms additional toughness and thickness, also called a callus, if exposed repeatedly to pressure or friction.
A bunch of nerves in your skin are connected to your muscles instead of your brain. These send signals through your spinal cord. This enables you to react more quickly to pain, heat, etc.
Any changes that appear in your skin signal changes in your health.
Dry skin is not only a cosmetic issue. It means the skin is broken, which provides an ineffective barrier against diseases.
