The Remarkable Life of the Skin

both an individual and societal level, our physical skin is intertwined with our very being. Foucault argued that any intentional physical change to the appearance of the skin, from Botox to body art, is a ‘technology of the self’.10 We change our bodies ‘in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, perfection or immortality’. When we change our skin, we change ourselves.

one of the least transmissible infectious diseases and 95 per cent of people are naturally immune to it.15

known reservoirs of M. leprae is the nine-banded armadillo, as this little armoured animal shares the same cool body temperature as human skin

Mycobacterium leprae is a curious character, a bacterium that is both delicate and notoriously deceptive, hiding from the immune system by living inside Schwann cells (the insulation of our nervous wiring) or even inside macrophages, our own immune cells.

full set of albino body parts can fetch up to $100,000

tattowing’ for the first time. When you say this onomatopoeic word, which is derived from the Polynesian tatau, you can feel the tattoo artist striking the wooden comb, often impregnated with shark teeth, into the skin of the islander

While the top layer of skin is always renewing itself, the inked-up cells in the dermis stay there for the remainder of our lives, locked in for ever like intricate fossils on a cave wall. We essentially create an infinite infection. So if you sport a tattoo, spare a thought for the little fellows who went into battle thinking they were fighting an infection but were instead fated to spend the rest of their days embedded in your skin-based art.

macrophage (‘big eaters’, from the Ancient Greek) cells detect the pigment particles as foreign and try to eat them up. But their eyes are bigger than their stomachs, and many of these macrophages end up stuck, with the pigment trapped inside

only 20 per cent of the fibres that reach the visual areas of the brain originate in the eye; the rest come from memory areas of the brain. Our reality comes from the image of the world we construct in our mind via our senses, with the brain unconsciously filling in the gaps in the limited signals we receive. The vital reception of signals in our skin is a bridge – albeit sometimes a very long one – between the physical reality of the outside world and our perception of it: the world we create in our head. Our skin is truly an extension of our minds.
Touch is a most extraordinary sense, enabling our skin

If we see someone clap, we perceive the sight and sound at the same time. The brain, however, is processing these two discrete pieces of information travelling at different speeds and as a result our mind sees what happens in the world roughly half a second after it actually happens.