Here’s some fun skin facts
The skin does more than just hold our soft stuff in…it is our body’s largest organ. That’s right, an organ!
It’s about 2 millimeters thick, and has a total of 7 layers! Our skin shields the body against heat, light, injury, and infection.
It also regulates body temperature (by heating up and sweating), stores water, fat, and vitamin D, and plays a role in the immune system protecting us from disease.
The skin of an average adult weighs 7-9 pounds, would stretch out to 21 square feet, and has more than 11 miles of blood vessels!
We lose about 30,000 to 40,000 dead skin cells every minute- that’s about 9 pounds of dead cells per year!
We “shed” our skin and replace it with a new one every 2-4 weeks! In fact, most of the dust in your house is made of dead skin cells!
And globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere.
Horns, hooves, feathers, fur (hair), and scales are all different evolutionary adaptations of skin.
On a hot day, the skin sometimes releases as much as 3 gallons of sweat!
Body odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting fatty compounds from sweat!
Harvard Law School, Brown University, and the Cleveland Public Libraries all have books covered in human skin. Some are crime trial “journals” covered in skin from the criminal!
We have at least five types of receptors in the skin that respond to touch and pain. Some of these sensors respond to a pressure of only 20 milligrams- that’s why we can feel an ant crawling on us!