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Skin: the body’s envelope

‘You gotta have skin,

All you really need is skin

Skin’s the thing that if you got it outside

It helps keep your insides in’

—‘Skin’, Allan Sherman

ONCE, on a long-distance flight, I sat next to a young man from southern Italy. After a brief conversation about how little Sorrento on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula resembled Sorrento, Campania, he closed his eyes and slept throughout most of the 11-hour flight.

I didn’t begrudge his silent slumber, however, as it gave me the opportunity to contemplate the delicious milky-brown skin at the nape of his neck. His soft black hair was short, and the delicate groove that ran from the base of his skull to his second or third vertebra was tantalisingly visible. I didn’t run my finger along that silky hollow, but I indulged myself in imagining doing it. I was content simply to gaze as he, completely oblivious to the effortless beauty of his own skin, slept on.

OUR SKIN fixes the boundaries of our physical selves and separates us from the rest of the world. It is the wrapping on the package of flesh, blood, and bone that is our body. Pliant, elastic, able to heal itself, it is where we end and the rest of the cosmos begins.

Exquisitely sensitive and able to register the faintest nuances of atmospheric change, our skin lays us bare to a constant bombardment of sensation.

Through our skin we contact the world; with it we touch and are touched. The skin alerts us to texture, temperature, pressure, pain and pleasure. It is scratched, kneaded, rubbed, and pinched and in response is soothed, stung, and irritated, along with our emotions. Demanding to be stroked and massaged, it flushes and blushes, tickles and tingles, itches and burns. Exterior stimuli prompt it to exude sweat and other fluids from its pores and glands. Freckles, dimples, wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, and moles occur like features on a landscape and the skin itself can range in colour from the milkiest white to an intense blue-black. Eruptions of boils, shingles, or pimples may mar its surface, causing pain and embarrassment. Alarmingly, it bruises and bleeds. Blistering and flaking, puckering and stretching—and feeling, always feeling—the skin is in a constant state of response, alerting the body to the conditions that surround it.

Our skin is unique to each of us; not even identical twins will share the same fingerprint. The pattern of whorls, ridges, and lines found on the tips of the fingers are peculiar to every individual, and can be used to identify us or determine where we have been and what we have touched.

If the skin can leave traces alluding to past events, it is tempting to believe that it can also reveal intimations of the future. If you gaze at your palm for long enough it can come to look like a map, or even a landscape; perhaps the mouth of a mighty river delta, or an aerial view of channel country in flood.

The romance of having your fortune mapped out in the contours and swirls of your palm, the etched lines crisscrossing the fleshy pad and revealing the key to your fortune, is seductive. It’s an intoxicating idea that you carry the secrets of your life cradled in your hand and yet concealed, only those versed in the lore of chiromancy able to unlock the secrets there.

The scene is easy to conjure up: the wrinkled crone, swathed in appropriately bohemian garb, firmly grasping your hand in hers. She turns your palm upward and traces her finger (be-ringed and grubby) along the lines and creases there. Lovers, children, spouses, health, wealth and contentment: all the veiled secrets of your future are revealed by this inheritor of Romany wisdom and relayed to you when you cross the gypsy’s own dusky palm with silver.

The palm—owing to its sensitivity, and because it can be hidden by a curl of the fingers and therefore also be exposed—is a locus for both vulnerability and a sort of sacredness. It is here that the stigmata, the marks resembling bloody wounds which mimic those inflicted by the nails that fastened Christ to the cross, generally occur. Whether you believe stigmata expose a charlatan or someone experiencing intense identification with the passion of Christ, in reality, those iron spikes were probably driven through the base of the hand in order to support the dragging weight of an adult male, rather than through the palm.

Nevertheless, the palm remains a site of nuance. We hold up our hands with the palms facing outwards as a sign of submission or surrender, but also paradoxically as a sign of dominance, defiance, or triumph.

Even among those impervious to romance and dismissive of anything with even a whiff of the paranormal, the skin has a reputation for sensitivity that goes beyond an ability to perceive the physical world. We feel a niggling heat on the back of our neck, and turn to find the eyes of another are trained upon us. When a sudden, unexplained shiver snakes up our back, we explain it by saying someone just walked over our grave.

A similar force was at play when one of the three witches, sensing the approach on a Scottish heath of that soon-to-be slayer of kings and slaughterer of babies, Macbeth, told her sisters, ‘By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes.’

Itching skin is an omen—of receiving money or of giving it away, depending on which palm it is that you have to scratch. And whether we count ourselves as superstitious or not, when the skin of our ears burns red we can’t but wonder who is talking about us.

Given the centrality of skin to our existence, it is no wonder that our language is rich with allusions to it. In these aphorisms and adages, the qualities of skin deemed inherent to it include its sensitivity, its alignment with the self, and the snugness with which it enfolds us.

‘Thin-skinned’ is how we describe someone who is overly reactive; the charge is levelled at those who take offence at any perceived slight, acting wounded when no attack or injury was intended. In the same vein, being told you have the ‘hide of an elephant’ may be taken as a sign of grudging admiration that you are impervious to insults, or as a slight on your insensitive nature.

Something distasteful is said to make our ‘skin crawl’. We’re all familiar with this sensation: the skin recoiling as if independent of the rest of the body. Shoulders hunch and quiver, prickles of sensation radiate up the back of our neck, and our scalp tightens round the bones of the skull. Often, it’s the very things that crawl—spiders, rats, centipedes (or people whom we feel share similar attributes)—that have this effect on our irritable hides.

Someone who has ‘saved their own skin’ is burdened with the implication that they have abandoned others in order to ensure their own survival. It may be that they leapt from a burning building while others were still struggling to reach the window; or perhaps they disassociated themselves from a failed venture in the workplace. In either scenario, the insinuation is that they have been less than valiant.

People are admired for being in touch with their feelings—able to not only identify their emotions but to express them honestly. My mother would threaten to take payment for a favour ‘out of my hide’, a nod to the idea that the skin has currency.

Similarly, to ‘have skin in the game’ is to risk your own money in a business venture. Skin is a tenuously thin membrane, and so a goal narrowly achieved is done ‘by the skin of your teeth’, and a ‘skinflint’ is so mean he would try to fleece the nonexistent integument from a piece of stone. We might pronounce that ‘beauty is only skin deep’ in an attempt to counter praise of a gorgeous individual, casting doubt on the calibre of their character.

‘Shedding one’s skin’ is both an image of growth and of re-invention, and yet skin, quixotically, is also a symbol of intransigence. The rhetorical question posed in Jeremiah 13:23, ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard change his spots?’ makes the point that one accustomed to doing evil is unlikely to alter their behaviour and do good.

To be comfortable in your own unchangeable skin is to be at ease with the person you have become: your metaphorical skin ‘fits like a glove’, and you wear your imperfections and idiosyncrasies lightly.

Someone filled with vigour may be described as ‘fit to jump out of her skin’, her energy almost unable to be contained by the constrictions of her close-fitting epidermis.

Someone who ‘gets under our skin’ may do so in a pleasurable or abrasive fashion. Regardless of whether we’re drawn to or repelled by such a person, their existence provokes a reaction akin to that of a splinter. Impossible to ignore, we must poke and worry at the source of irritation, raking at it with our nails until it’s dislodged.

Most crucially, for all its symbolism and associated imagery, the skin, made up of layers and stretched over the entire body, is our body’s largest organ. It exists in contrast with the more visceral images of pulsing wet muscles and the red masses of heart, liver, and kidney that usually spring to mind when we contemplate our organs. These are hidden and slightly repulsive, glistening dangerously, revealed only when the body itself is laid open. The skin, as an ideal, is smooth and pliant, inviting connection, promising containment, and defining beauty.

An adult’s skin-surface area will measure between one-and-half to two square metres, and be between one and two millimetres deep. Contrast that with the whale shark, whose mighty epidermis complements its massive size with a depth of around 102 millimetres. Visualise your own skin as a pelt with thickets of hair erupting from the head, the armpits, and the groin, stretched out as a rug on a floor or pinned to a wall, much like a trophy hunter might display the hide of a tiger. True, it may not boast the exotic stripes and wild, elemental beauty of the coat of a big cat, but it is impressive nonetheless.

Thickest on the palms of our hands and on the soles of our feet and thinnest on our eyelids, our skin is constantly being rubbed off and replaced by cells that migrate from the deeper layers of the epidermis. Unlike most mammals, we are relatively glabrous, or hairless, which allows for more efficient evaporation of our sweat, and so assists in the regulation of our body temperature. Embedded in the skin, and growing through it, are hair, nails, and sweat glands. Buried within it are blood and lymph vessels, nerve endings, sebaceous glands, and tiny involuntary muscles attached to our hair follicles.

Our skin envelops us, acting as a barrier against invading microbes and chemical irritants. It protects the underlying tissue from injury and infection, helps to regulate the body’s temperature, and alerts the body to environmental factors through its nerve endings: too hot, too cold, too toxic, too sharp—the skin alerts us to the dangers, and the comforts that surround us.

Surprisingly tough yet vulnerable, the skin is a frail and all-too-penetrable veil: blades can slice it, fire can burn it, and toxic substances can be absorbed through it. The loss of a substantial amount of our elastic armour will kill us, rendering us unable to regulate our temperature or block bacteria intent on colonising the warm, wet recesses of our susceptible body. Breach it and we bleed.

You only have to see the pulse beneath a baby’s fontanelle, where the skull bones are yet to fuse, or the subtle but continuous beat of blood coursing through the carotid arteries at the throat to have the vulnerability of the body’s first line of defence impressed upon you. The merest nick of knife—yes, it would have to be well placed—could see our life drain away, leaving nothing but a dry husk.

Because of this vulnerability, is it any wonder then that few of us ever really feel comfortable just in our own skins? We spend most of our lives draped in clothes; poor, naked, hairless apes we are without them.

The skin is a border, and one that is usually heavily protected and shielded from view, and from the elements. Even the triangles of skimpy bathing suits worn on beaches lend a modicum of defence. Not only does one feel less exposed in the obvious way when one is clothed, but also more veiled at a metaphysical level.

Visually, as well as in a tactile sense, our edges are blunted and muffled when we are dressed. Naturalists are a minority, although most of us have dared the pleasure of skinny-dipping at some point in our lives. There is an abandon associated with nudity, a reckless joy exhibited by streakers at the cricket and by the whoops of bathers plunging naked into the ocean.

Of course, it is also the flagrant display of sexual organs that excites and titillates, not simply the unimpeded view of the skin. Still, it is slightly bewildering that public nudity is viewed as anarchic and an effrontery that warrants being arrested.

I didn’t brave the cold and dark on the day that the photographer Spencer Tunick came to Melbourne in 2001 to photograph the bare bodies of the city’s citizens as they lay on Princess Bridge. Tunick is famous for his photos, taken all over the world, of groups of humanity in the altogether, lying on city streets or standing in orderly, terraced rows along roads, crowding the upward curve of a pedestrian bridge, or lying on their sides before the looming bulk of an enormous ship. In Tunick’s images, the variations of skin colour follow the curves and hollows of the bodies in stark opposition to the unyielding urban surfaces that they are often juxtaposed against.

Watching an edited video of the Melbourne shoot on YouTube, I found it inexplicably moving to see the mass of people—thousands of them—bare-arsed and happily excited in the muted dawn light, stampeding past the ladder on which the artist was perched with his loudhailer. They dropped onto the cold, wet road at his shouted instruction, but before the photo could be taken a man (fully clothed) ran into the shot bearing a large handwritten sign that echoed the words he chanted, ‘All men will bow to the name of Jesus Christ.’

‘God sent us into the world naked,’ one of the participants shouted back as the police dragged the protester away. His remonstrations were akin to objecting to dancing on a Sunday: there was nothing less lewd than this crowd of adults in their birthday suits, grinning like children at a birthday party. I experienced a mild pang of regret that I hadn’t dropped my daks, and the rest of my gear, to pose stark-naked with the lot of them: solemn, ridiculous, exposed.

The exposure of nakedness is something we sometimes crave because of the intimacy that it can help us to forge with another person. When we take a lover, our most urgent impulse is to caress our beloved’s skin. We delight in the warmth of their body against ours, and explore their skin as if it were a wondrous new terrain. We seek to discover the blemishes as well as the beauty, eager to know their physical shell in intimate detail. We might pause in delight at their mouth, tracing the shape of their lips, marvelling at the difference in colour and texture. Gently, we circle their nipples with our tongues, smiling with delight as these highly sensitive areas of skin tighten and become erect.

According to our predilections, it may be the smoothness of the underside of our lover’s upper arm, the hairiness of other parts, or the contrast between the two that intoxicates us. In our desire to get even closer, we attempt to penetrate the barrier of the skin through deep kissing and sexual intercourse so that, literally and figuratively, our bodies are joined.

What would sex be if not for touch? At its most fundamental, sex is, after all, just rubbing your skin against someone else’s. The platonic idea of love is all very well, but who would give up the delicious sensation of sinking into another’s arms and feeling wholly embraced within their skin?

And it’s not simply the feel, but also the smell of another’s skin that can transport us. I can recall vividly the sweet sweatiness, completely devoid of staleness, exuded by a young man whom I studied with decades ago. On hot Brisbane mornings, he would arrive at college, having ridden his bicycle up the myriad hills of the western suburbs, and arrive in time for our first class of the day, wet and glistening, and smelling divine.

The touch of skin on skin is not just for lovers, of course. It is a delightful sensation at any age, and is essential to our physical and psychological development. Anxious parents of premature babies huddle beside humidicribs, gently reaching inside to stroke their tiny offspring’s bodies. Desperate to hold their babies, but prevented from doing so by the medical paraphernalia, they caress their infant in any way they can.

Babies denied touch at this early stage of life have lower growth rates and spend more time crying than babies who are touched. In most hospitals where pre-term babies are cared for, ‘kangaroo care’ is encouraged where possible. This involves placing the babies against their parents’ chests, inside the parent’s clothing, so that parent and baby are skin to skin. Not only does this help to calm the tiny newborns and promote development, it also helps mothers to feel more bonded to their babies, and to express more breast milk. In an article that I read promoting the benefits of such care for all newborns, not just those born prematurely, the baby, its skin pressed up against its mother’s, was described as being in its ‘natural habitat’.

As a toddler, my youngest son adored the feel of skin on skin. If he caught me having a quick siesta on the couch, he would leap on me, pulling up first my shirt and then his own. Smiling as he lay against me, the warmth of our two skins as they touched was always surprising and vital. I took an almost-guilty pleasure in the sensuousness of it. His skin was wondrous to me. So smooth, so even; I would find myself reaching out to touch it, stroke it, kiss it. It fitted him so perfectly, without a wrinkle; nowhere did it sag or pouch. His young, firm flesh pushed out against his velvety covering, which wrapped itself around him in a taut, tight embrace.

Our skin is the most outwardly reliable indicator of our age. As we grow older, our collagen fibres gradually lose their ability to bind water—a property that gives the skin its elasticity. As a result, wrinkles begin to proliferate. The skin also thins, and often lesions develop as a result of exposure to the sun. We can all look forward to the papery skin of old age, sagging and bagging, more prone to tears and breaches.

In the West, where youth has become fetishised to an alarming degree, an entire industry is based on the desire to keep our skins as pristine as possible. We buy sunscreen to prevent damage, moisturisers to promote elasticity, and lather on anti-ageing creams in an attempt to repair the ravages of time. Paralysing toxins are injected into facial muscles to inhibit frowning and so display an unlined brow. We subject our skin to chemical peels in order to slough off outer layers and reveal newer skin cells beneath. In response to advertising that encourages dissatisfaction with our appearance, we lighten our skin or darken it with cosmetics and UV lamps.

According to fashion or custom, skin is daubed in colour or designs. Tattoos, piercings, and scarification are used as adornment, as a sign of cultural allegiance, or to hint at times of boredom spent in a correctional institution. We tussle with our skin, hide it, drape it, reveal it, or dab it with perfumes and deodorant in an attempt to camouflage our scent. We apply colour to our lips and faces for dramatic effect, striving to project the image of an ideal self—youthful, healthy, and confident—or to show that we are conforming to, or rebelling against, the expectations of society.

Yet our skin is not always a reliable ally—it can betray us, sending signals that belie our words, actions, or attitude. Apprehension, stress, or sexual attraction may cause our sweat glands to seep a watery fluid containing urea, minerals and amino acids. Glands in our armpits, on our faces, the mons pubis, nipples, and the scrotum ooze a milky, viscous liquid in response to emotional stimulus. A rush of blood to the face can signal our shame, arousal, embarrassment, or the fact that we have just told a lie. The cold sweat of fear, and the accompanying odours that spring unbidden from our pores, may alert a foe to our terror and give courage to their assault.

The skin is like a neon light, flashing signals that provide clues to our health, wealth, race, and occupation, and encouraging others to make assumptions about us. A tan line may define us as an outdoor worker, a stretch mark as a mother. In Aboriginal cultures, a boy’s transition to manhood might be marked physically on the body through scarification, while in India the shade of your skin might indicate your caste. Tightness around the temples may hint at a facelift, while a certain type of lesion on the skin known as Kaposi’s sarcoma could mark you as having AIDS. Strangers assess your skin and use the information found there to make judgements about your morals, your intelligence, and your worth.

In a number of cultural and religious traditions, one piece of the skin on the male body is deemed superfluous or even unclean: circumcision surgically removes the prepuce, or foreskin, the fold of skin that covers the head of the penis. The operation is usually performed soon after birth, although in some cultures it is done much later.

In recent years, circumcision has fallen from favour, deemed to be an unnecessary and painful operation. However, debate continues within the medical profession about the health benefits of removing this relatively small amount of skin, with some research suggesting that circumcised men are less likely to become infected with HIV Although male circumcision is a much less radical operation than the mutilation of female circumcision, there are still men who feel the loss of their severed foreskin keenly, and who seek to restore it through both surgical and non-surgical methods.

Jesus, a Jew, was circumcised. According to Christian tradition, Jesus ascended into heaven after his death, taking his body with him. This left his foreskin as the only relic of his physical body remaining on earth. At least 13 churches worldwide claim still to have this tiny relic. In one re-telling of the story of St Catherine of Sienna, she has a vision of marrying Jesus in a mystical union where he places a ring made from his foreskin on her finger. St Angela of Blannbekin, an Austrian saint who lived around the turn of the 14th century, claimed to have had a vision where she swallowed Christ’s foreskin. Apparently, it tasted intensely sweet. Like the air we breathe, we take our skin for granted. We seldom remark upon it except in the context of our collective phobia of ageing, fuelled and exploited by the cosmetics industry. Yet it is remarkable; it mitigates and ameliorates the sometimes-harsh world we dwell in, and is at the interface of so much of what we encounter. It is our border, the edge of ourselves, the point where we meet our universe.

I AM NOT AN ACADEMIC, a scientist, a doctor, or a cultural theorist. I am a writer who has become intrigued and captivated by the precariously thin veil of our epidermis, and how it mediates and facilitates our experience of the world.

This is by no means an attempt to write the definitive book on skin. Instead, it is a dalliance with that which wraps us up—a teasing out of some of the gruesome, visceral, personal, and interesting aspects of the human skin.

If I had to pinpoint one moment when the subject of skin became an obsession, I would not be able to do it. It was a gradual awareness that began perhaps when my children were born and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that it was their physical selves that I first bonded with. Our skins were our initial meeting place, and it is their enveloping skin that continues to enthral me. This fascination has, in part, been the starting point for my manuscript.

Once I embarked on the task of writing about skin, I came across newspaper and magazine articles almost on a weekly basis that referenced skin in some way: medical breakthroughs, streakers at the cricket, the horrific scarring of those injured in the Bali bombings, a footballer sledging an opponent about his tattoo, instances of racism, alarm about the dangers of tanning salons, and makeup tips of the rich and beautiful. In the face of such a barrage of topics into which to delve and research, I toyed with the idea of simply making lists: the top ten functions of the skin; aphorisms and literary quotes regarding skin; skin conditions you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; the five ugliest tattoos I’ve ever seen ... But it became apparent that this would be a far too glib approach, especially when I began talking to people whose skin—or for whom the skin of others—loomed large in their life, their work, their emotions, or their art. For tattooists, burns surgeons, dermatologists, and those whose bodies wear the marks of the sustained assault of fire or disease, the skin is no small thing; it is integral to who they are and how they experience the world. This is true for all of us, of course, whether we are aware of it or not.

In the daily routine of human transactions—small and large, commercial or otherwise—our skins are the interface between us. Not only are our minds, through our skin, ‘brought into relation with external objects’, as described in that classic text Gray’s Anatomy, but, on a deeper level, it is through our skin that we connect to our world and the others with whom we share the planet. Apart from intestinal rumblings and the odd heart palpitation, the mind is aware of the body primarily through the skin.

When we touch another person—no matter how fleeting the contact—a bond is established or modulated to some degree: a perfunctory kiss between spouses; a passionate, full-body embrace in the pre-dawn; an overwhelming rush of love as a parent nuzzles their child’s neck; a press of the hand from a trusted friend. Other, more casual contacts also occur: a pat on the shoulder, a shake of the hand, a touching of palms as coins are exchanged or a credit card is proffered. Along the way, items are bought, deals finalised, respect given, emotions communicated, attention sought, and pain inflicted.

Skin, as burns surgeon Fiona Wood remarked to me, is ‘not just a plastic bag to keep our giblets in’. No, indeed: the skin is a parchment, a canvas, a prison, a barrier, a conduit, a revelation; like silk, like sandpaper, like flaky pastry; the colour of milk, of chocolate, of wheat, of burnt biscuits. As we go about our daily lives, we constantly brush up against our fellow human beings. Each of these individuals exists inside their own tenuous envelope: the only thing that separates them from the rest of the universe—their skin.