Skin Anatomy: How Your Skin Protects You

Anti-Aging Skin Care Series, Part 1

Your skin is the largest organ of your body, and your skin’s anatomy reveals a lot of information about you to the rest of the world.

Here are just a few examples of what skin anatomy reveals about you:

• Your skin’s color and texture are inherited through genetics, and that provides information about your family history.
• After vigorous exercise, you have a unique scent that is created by your particular combination of skin secretions from your sebaceous and sweat glands. Even the amount of perspiration can differ from one person to another.
• Whether you tan or burn during sun exposure is controlled by the amount of melanin you inherited.

Your Best Protector
Describing someone as having “thin skin” is not far from the truth.

While the actual thickness of skin varies throughout the body, the thinnest skin (approximately 0.5mm) is found on the eyelids, and the thickest skin (approximately 4mm) is on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet.

Despite this lack of density, your skin protects your body in remarkable ways:

• Skin protects body tissues and organs against injuries.
• The nerves in your skin receive the stimuli that tell your brain when your skin has been touched.
• The nerves in your skin also help your brain respond to sensations of hot and cold.
• Your skin helps to regulate your body’s temperature by making your pores smaller when it’s cold, and making pores larger when it’s hot.
• Your skin is the “armor” that helps to protect your immune system from bacteria and disease.
• Skin keeps your essential body fluids (blood, water and lymph) from evaporating.
• Your skin protects you from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays. The amount of sun protection you have depends on the amount of melanin you inherited.

Skin Anatomy
Your skin anatomy is composed of three layers, the epidermis, the dermis, and subcutaneous fat.

Epidermis: This is the top layer of skin, and it is somewhat translucent, so light can partially pass through it. There are no blood vessels in the epidermis, so this top layer gets it’s nutrients and oxygen from the deeper layers. The epidermis is attached to the next layer, the dermis, via a membrane.

Dermis: This is the second, deeper layer of your skin. The dermis is where your hair roots and sweat glands reside, and the dermis also contains with some blood vessels and nerves.

Subcutaneous fat: This is the bottom or lowest layer of your skin, and this is where your larger blood vessels and nerves reside. The subcutaneous fat layer is composed of fat-filled cells call adipose cells, and the depth of the subcutaneous fat layer is different from one person to another.

Subcutaneous fat is attached to your bones and muscles by connective tissue which is loose, allowing skin to move. If you have too much subcutaneous fat, the connection points of your connective tissue become more obvious. This causes a pockmarked or rippled appearance--the dreaded cellulite.

Next in the Anti-Aging Skin Care Series:
There are two biological processes that cause skin to age. Learn which one you can’t control...and which one you can, in What Causes Aging Skin?