Understanding What Your Skin Does For You

We all know the importance of looking after our skin – but it’s possible that you don’t know all the ways that your skin already looks after you. Not just by keeping all your vital organs inside you, but also by regulating your temperature, protecting you from potentially cancerous aggressors, and even shielding you from germs and bacteria!

Our Skin Regulates Our Core Body Temperature

This is an important one. Without a consistent body temperature, we’d get all sorts of ill – from excess heat and cold alike! Sweating is just one really good example of how our bodies use our skin to regulate their own internal temperature. (Some of us even have naturally overactive sweat glands – which is where our anti-perspiration treatments come in handy.) Meanwhile when we’re cold, our capillary vessels contract instead, slowing down our bloodflow and keeping ourselves marginally warmer for as long as we can. Still no substitute for a good radiator, but pretty impressive anyway!

We Use Our Skin To Feel

Our skin is the frontline, the first and foremost part of our body we use to explore the world around us. Through it, we feel heat, cold, sensations, pressure, and even pain. Your skin is home to countless receptors that send messages to your central nervous system, for example “that cushion feels very soft” or “the water is now hot, which means you’re burning your fingers”. These electrical signals are transmitted within a fraction of a second, too fast for our conscious minds to process, which is why you whip your hand away from the burning hob instantly rather than pausing to realise why.

Our Skin Protects Us

Another vital job our skin performs is as a physical barrier from outside elements to the more fragile, squishier parts of our bodies. When you scrape against a sharp piece of metal, it’s your skin that takes the hit – which is just as well, because you definitely don’t want it to be your muscles! It’s not only physical impacts our skin protects against, though, but also the more undesirable chemical and biological stuff, like bacteria. It does this through a hydro-lipid film, or, if you like, the much cooler-sounding ‘acid mantle’. It’s a thin, oily coat of moisture that sits on top of your skin and protects you from bacteria and other nasty germs.

A suntan is far from just a shorthand way to tell everyone you’ve been on holiday – it’s actually your skin’s defence mechanism against the sun’s harmful UV radiation. Its natural response against this radiation is to produce melanin, which causes your skin to darken, and you to end up with a tan. As a side note, the skin protects us from water too! Being naturally waterproof means we can swim, bathe or walk around freely in rain, all without having to be concerned about our bodies absorbing too much water.

We don’t know what you think, but at APSkincare we think that’s not too bad, all in all! Of course, taking care of your skin is vital to ensure it keeps doing good work, which you can do with any one of our professional skincare treatments. If you have any questions or need any advice, we’re just a phone call away on 01284 297 000.

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