The Remarkable Life of the Skin Quotes

“We have eccrine sweat glands all over our skin, but their density is greatest on our palms and soles. However, these areas do not seem to produce a larger volume of sweat in response to heat and exercise; instead, the glands on our hands and feet respond keenly to another stimulant of our autonomic nerves: stress. This explains why we get clammy hands as we wait outside an interview room, no matter what the temperature. Perhaps surprisingly, the sweat on our palms and soles actually increases friction and grip on the skin’s surface, as our body readies itself for grappling with an enemy or fleeing up a tree.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“A new body of evidence suggests that skin cells contain complex internal clocks that run on a twenty-four-hour rhythm influenced by the body’s ‘master clock’, which sits ticking away in an area of the brain called the hypothalamus.13 Overnight, keratinocytes proliferate rapidly, preparing and protecting our outer barrier for the sunlight and scratches of the coming day. During the day, these cells then selectively switch on genes involved with protection against the sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays. A 2017 study took this one step further and found, rather remarkably, that midnight feasts could actually cause sunburn.14 If we eat late at night, our skin’s clock assumes that it must be dinner time and consequently pushes back the activation of the morning-UV-protection genes, leaving us more exposed the next day.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“By 1887, Lord Kelvin, the Scottish mathematician and physicist, was already famous for his innumerable scientific discoveries, not least determining the value of temperature’s absolute zero. But in his later years he sought to discover the perfect structure for foam. This odd proposal aimed to address a previously unasked mathematical question: what was the best shape to enable objects of equal volume to fill a space yet have the smallest amount of surface area between them? Although his work was dismissed as ‘a pure waste of time’ and ‘utterly frothy’ by his contemporaries, he worked his way through intense calculations, finally proposing a three-dimensional fourteen-face shape that when positioned together formed a beautiful honeycomb-like structure.6 The hypothetical ‘tetradecahedron’ doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and for a century it seemed that Kelvin’s contribution had no relevance to either material science or the natural world. Then, in 2016, scientists in Japan and London, with the help of advanced microscopy, took a closer look at the human epidermis.7 They discovered that as our keratinocytes rise up to the stratum granulosum before their final ascent to the surface, they adopt this unique fourteen-face shape. So even though our skin cells are always on the move before flaking off, the surface contacts between cells are so tight and ordered that water still cannot get through. It turns out that our skin is the ideal foam. Like the intricate geometric tiles seen in medieval Islamic architecture, our skin combines function and form to make a beautiful barrier.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Great things are done by a series of small things brought together.’ VINCENT VAN GOGH”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“He came to recognize that on both an individual and societal level, our physical skin is intertwined with our very being. Foucault argued that any intentional physical change to the appearance of the skin, from Botox to body art, is a ‘technology of the self’.10 We change our bodies ‘in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, perfection or immortality’. When we change our skin, we change ourselves.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“While keratinocytes are the predominant cells of the epidermis, arguably the most important cells in the dermis are the fibroblasts – the construction workers.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“About half of people with severe eczema have a mutation in the filaggrin”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“mutations in the gene that carries the code for the protein filaggrin were strongly associated with eczema.11 Filaggrin is essential for the integrity of the barrier”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Although an individual human sheds more than a million skin cells each day, making up roughly half the dust found in our homes,5 our entire epidermis is completely replaced each month, yet remarkably this endless state of flux doesn’t cause our skin barrier to leak.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“An extra, fifth layer of epidermis is found in thicker areas of skin, namely the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. The stratum lucidum (clear layer) is four to five cells thick and sits just beneath the stratum corneum.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“so when keratinocytes finally reach the top layer of the skin, the stratum corneum, they are effectively dead – but they have realized their purpose:”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“In the stratum granulosum, or granular layer, the cells flatten, release their fats and lose their nucleus, the cell’s gene-containing brain.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“The epidermis is made up of between fifty and one hundred layers of keratinocytes,”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Once a new keratinocyte is created, it slowly moves upwards to the next layer, the stratum spinosum, or spiny layer. Here, these young adult cells start to link up with adjacent keratinocytes via intensely strong protein structures called desmosomes. They also start to synthesize different types of fat within their cell body, which will soon provide the all-important mortar in our skin’s outer wall.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Keratinocytes are produced in the deepest, basal layer of the epidermis, the stratum basale, which lies directly on top of the dermis. This vanishingly-thin layer, sometimes just one cell thick,”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ

“Weighing nine kilograms and covering two square metres, skin wasn’t even recognized as an organ until the eighteenth century. When we think of organs, or the human body at all, we rarely think of our skin. It is invisible in plain sight.”
― Monty Lyman, The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An Intimate Journey Across Our Largest Organ