What Is Skin?
When we think of the human body, we immediately think about brain, heart, liver and lungs as “organs”. They perform certain functions. Let us know, that skin is also an organ. Other organs take up some space, the skin is spread out as thinly as possible to form a thin cover. In fact, this coat covers an area of 19375 square centimetres. There are a fantastic number of structures, ranging from sweat glands to nerves, in each square centimeter.
The skin is composed of two layers of tissue. one is thicker deep layer, called the ‘corium’. The other on the top, is the delicate tissue called the “epidermis”. Both these layers are joined to each other in a remarkable fashion. The bottom layer has “pegs”, that project into the upper layer. This upper layer is moulded over them to bind them together closely. The “pegs” are arranged in ridges, they form a kind of pattern which we can observe in certain locations on our skin. The fact is that the finger prints are made of these ridges.
Epidermis, the top layer of skin, does not contain any blood vessels. It actually consists of dead cells and been changed into ‘horn’. We may put it like this, that the human body is covered with horn shingles. This is very useful to us. The horn help protects us. It is insensitive, so it protects us from pain. Water has no effect, and is even an electrical insulator.
The very bottom layers of the epidermis are much alive, how-ever, it is their job to produce new cells. The new cells are pushed upwards by the mother cells. They are, in course of time, separated from their source of food and die to become horn.
Billions of the upper dead horn cells are moved every day in the natural course of our activities. Luckily, just as many billions of new cells are manufactured everyday. This is the reason for our skin always keeping young.
There are 30 layers of horn cells in our skin. Every time a top layer is moved by washing or rubbings a new one is underneath it. All the layers can never be used up. A new layer keeps pushing up from the bottom. This helps us to remove dirt and stains from our skins and keep it clean.
