When I was a kid, we used to have a joke amongst ourselves. You’d walk up to another kid who hadn’t heard this before and say, “Your epidermis is showing” And really what it meant is, your skin is showing, but kids at that age didn’t know what an epidermis was, but everybody’s skin is showing. But why do we have skin? What does our skin do? Well, it’s really kind of interesting. Our skin has a lot of different, very important functions. First of all, it’s our sealing. It’s what keeps the inside world in and the outside world out. It keeps all of the germs and all of the bacteria out of our system so we don’t get infections. It keeps all of our inner fluids, our blood, our chemicals, all of the important things that belong in our body, it keeps them inside. And that’s really what the outer layer of skin does, the epidermis. But then there’s a second layer, it’s called the dermis, and that’s where all of the machinery is. And the dermis has things like hair follicles and sweat glands. That’s where the blood vessels are, that’s how we control our temperature. That’s how we perspire. That’s how we feel things with nerves. And lastly, on the very bottom is the subcutaneous layer, which is really the fat layer. That’s there to store energy and it also helps with regulation of temperature and it also helps buffer us against injury. As we get older, it gets thinner and that’s one of the things that’s responsible for the appearance of an aging face. The fact that the fat is thinning out. So the next time you take your skin for granted, just remember, it’s a very versatile, multifunction organ, and without it, we couldn’t live.
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