Читать книгу Good Skin - Ingrid Wood - Страница 7

If you look in the mirror, your skin looks like a simple covering for the body. In fact this is a deceptive image: consider that the skin is the largest living organ in the human body, as essential and hard working as the brain or heart, and the closest contact we have with the outside world. It’s literally our last outpost, and usually the unsung hero. Besides its obvious role of keeping our insides in, skin is also responsible for keeping foreign invaders out, regulating body temperature, getting rid of waste matter, acting as a water reservoir, manufacturing vitamin D from sunlight and housing our senses of touch and pain.

From a distance, your skin appears smooth and flat, but on closer inspection you will see that a network of tiny grooves, which change shape as the skin moves, marks the surface. A cross section looks a little like a complex Dagwood sandwich, with various layers and fillings. The two skin layers – the epidermis and dermis – rest on a third layer of subcutaneous fat, and send signals to the brain to set various physiological functions in motion. In order to take the best care of your skin, it’s important to understand how these layers work.

Every day we shed about 4% of our total skin cells – that’s about 14kg (30lb) in a lifetime.