20 Interesting Facts About Skin

Discover Magazine has an interesting list of 20 things you didn’t know about the skin. I knew all of them. Well, most of them anyway. I reprinted a few. The rest are here.

  • It’s your body’s largest organ.
  • An average adult’s skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.
  • The skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather.
  • Breasts are a modified form of sweat gland.
  • Blowin’ in the wind: Globally, dead skin accounts for about a billion tons of dust in the atmosphere. Your skin sheds 50,000 cells every minute.
  • “In the buff” became synonymous for “nude” in 17th-century England. The term derives from soldiers’ leather tunics, or “buffs,” whose light brown color apparently resembled an Anglo-Saxon backside.
  • White skin appeared just 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climates and lost much of their melanin pigment.

Related posts:

  1. Skin Care Myths: Drinking More Water Will Hydrate Your Skin This is a popular one, perpetuated by fitness and fashion...

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