Shaking hands, washing up, kissing someone, holding a child…. not a single day goes by without your touching someone else or your skin being touched. It’s an integral part of your everyday life.
The skin is the body’s largest organ. It protects the human organism from the outside environment.
Facts and Figures
The heaviest organ in the human body, weighing twice as much as the brain.
The organ with the biggest surface area: the surface area covers from 1.5 to 2 square meters on an average adult.
Thickness varies from 1 to 4 millimeters.
Surface temperature hovers around 85 to 90°F under normal conditions, with the exception of the underarms, where the temperature can climb to 95°F.
pH value is usually somewhere between 4 and 5.5.
At the Heart of Our Humanity
The skin accounts for 20% of a newborn’s weight with a surface area of 2,500 cm2. It accounts for 18% of an adult’s weight with a surface area of about 18,000 cm2.
Skin is the sense organ that develops first. Before the sense of smell or taste, the sense of touch is the first to develop in human embryos.
Skin is a vital body tissue. Serious burns covering a more or less extended surface area can have dire consequences and may even be fatal.
On average, the skin contains fifty nerve receptors per 100 square millimeters. But that’s only an average. The ultra-sensitive skin on the fingertips contains 2500 receptors per square millimeter.
