The Remarkable Life of the Skin

The Remarkable Life of the Skin: An intimate journey across our surface, by Monty Lyman, 2019, is a science book for the general public about the body’s largest organ. Lyman is a medical doctor in Oxford, UK, specializing in dermatology who has worked in different areas of the world for his training as well as for researching case studies for this book. This book is my choice for the category Health of the 2025 Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

The book is organized into 10 chapters which focus on the various aspects of our skin. For example: ‘Skin Safari,’ describing the various layers and microbes of the skin; ‘Towards the Light,’ about the sun’s effect on the skin; ‘Ageing Skin,’ self-explanatory; ‘Psychological Skin,’ looking at ways people are affected by skin conditions and illnesses; ‘Social Skin,’ detailing how the kind of skin we have (diseases, color, tattoos, etc.) influences how we are perceived by others; etc. In addition, there is a Glossary, an extensive Reference section, an Index and illustrations.

I had known that the skin is the largest organ, but there were many facts that were new to me. Here are some tidbits from the book:

• “Without our envelope of skin, we would evaporate.”
• “Although an individual human sheds more than a million skin cells each day, making up roughly half the dust found in our homes, our entire epidermis is completely replaced each month, yet remarkably this endless state of flux doesn’t cause our skin barrier to leak.”
• “The network of blood vessels in the skin is eleven miles long, enough to bridge Europe and Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar.”
• There are 3 types of fingerprint patterns (arch, loop, whorl), and family members have the same type, but not identically (even in identical twins). It’s still not known what the purpose of fingerprints is.
• There is no such thing as a “healthy” tan.
• Sun exposure is the number one cause of wrinkles, more than all other factors combined. It’s also the cause of age- or liver-spots.
• “The key to youthful skin is sun protection, and the most effective anti-ageing cream is sunscreen.”
• Studies have shown that people are more likely to limit their sun exposure if told that it will prevent wrinkles, rather than that it will prevent skin cancer.
• The skin allows us to touch something and know what it is, and to grip it with the right amount of force through a number of different cells. For example, the Merkel cells “continuously provide the brain with detailed information regarding the shape and edges of an object”. And the Meissner cells “literally catch us every time we fall. As you hold [an object], it actually slips a thousandth of a millimetre a number of times a second. Our Meissner corpuscles can detect this loss and, in a series of rapid reflexes, cause our skin to tighten so that we don’t end up dropping the object. All of this is completely subconscious.”
• “The concentration of nerve endings in a given area of skin affects the accuracy of sensation. This explains the long-known fact that women tend to have a better sense of touch than men: just as the same amount of gin in less tonic makes a more potent aperitif, the same number of mechanoreceptors in smaller fingers makes a more sensitive instrument.”
• Touch is so necessary to survival that babies who are otherwise cared for will die if they are not touched.
• “Another commonly held myth is that leprosy is highly infectious, whereas it is actually one of the least transmissible infectious diseases and 95 per cent of people are naturally immune to it.”

There are sections that were too technical for my taste, such as the extremely detailed descriptions of the bacteria and microbes in the skin and how they function. I found myself skimming over some of this information. But otherwise, Lyman presents an interesting and wide-ranging journey through this area of the body.