- It’s your body’s largest organ.
- Ooh, what smells like that? Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat—a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals and anus.
- Breasts are a modified form of the apocrine sweat gland.
- Fingerprints increase friction and help grip objects. New World monkeys have similar prints on the undersides of their tails, to grasp as they swing from branch to branch.
- There are at least five types of receptors in the skin that respond to pain and to touch.
- White skin appeared 20,000 to 50,000 years ago, as dark-skinned humans migrated to colder climes and lost much of their melanin pigment.
- An average adult’s skin spans 21 square feet, weighs 9 pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.
- The skin releases as much as 3 gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The areas that don’t sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, the tip of the penis and the eardrums.
- Yummy! The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.
- Some people never develop fingerprints at all. Two rare genetic defects, known as Naegeli Syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, can leave carriers without any identifying ridges on their skin.
