Here's Why Your Skin Doesn't Rip Easily
Your skin is an incredible organ, it holds you together, keeps invading pathogens from killing you, and also doesn't do this. Howdy skin jobs. Natalia here. Happy Halloween and thanks for tuning into DNews! Skin is the largest organ of your body. I've already mentioned a couple of the benefits of having skin -- but here are a few more: it grows hair to protect itself, it sweats to cool the body down, has goosebumps to warm us up, it's self healing, and senses the world around us… Seriously, we're wrapped up in one of the most fantastic materials! But, there's one thing that vertebrate skin doesn't do easily, and that's tear.
A good example here is, leather: cow skin. Motorcyclists wear it because if they crash it doesn't rip or break… it just skids, protecting their actual skin with other skin! Weird. In fact, leather should skid longer than either denim or bulletproof kevlar. Textile companies test the strengths of leather in what they call breaking strength tests. Basically, they attach two clamps and stretch it until it tears. One company published that the breaking strength of a 3-inch sample should never be less than 150 pounds. Remember, leather is just SKIN. So how can skin hold up against so much force? Well, because of its construction. Firstly, a bit about skin: not all skin is the same thickness. The skin of the foot or the back is 4 millimeters thick, while the skin of the genitals and eyelids is way thinner. In that cross section, there are three layers: the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis -- but the dermis is the thickest.
When you stretch your skin (like this) Hey, I'm kinda stretchy! You'll feel it pull back on you because of the 'type 1' collagen: a super-common coiled triple-helix protein. The stuff that lets it bounce back is called elastin: a network of fibers that help with, what else, skin elasticity (helping it hold its shape when it's stretched or bent). But even though we knew all this, a new study in Nature Communications found out why it can stretch, but doesn't tear! They found that the skin's actual fibers will rotate, straighten, stretch and slide, to keep the skin from ripping! Skin evolved to try and spread the stress from a hole, notch, or tear! That's so crazy, right? Normally collagen is disordered and chaotic, spread randomly throughout in our skin, but when skin is pulled, stretched or hooked into some kind of horror gore torture device…
These spiraled collagen fibrils reorient themselves, and align along the pull, resisting a tear, and keeping the inside of your body protected! Researchers used rabbit skin, and a sophisticated synchrotron x-ray machine to watch the collagen in action, and postulated that this is also how our own stretchy stuff gets its pluck. According to their studies, understanding this behavior could help improve synthetic and flexible fabrics, which currently use stuff like wheat gluten. Gluten is like glue that holds bread together, and it doesn't tear easily either! Skin is more tear-resistant than gluten!? That's a weird fact. As long as we're facting it up: beauty products often say they have elastin in them, just like your skin, but it comes from cows or birds and if you rub elastin on your face, it still doesn't go under the epidermis into the dermis.
A good example here is, leather: cow skin. Motorcyclists wear it because if they crash it doesn't rip or break… it just skids, protecting their actual skin with other skin! Weird. In fact, leather should skid longer than either denim or bulletproof kevlar. Textile companies test the strengths of leather in what they call breaking strength tests. Basically, they attach two clamps and stretch it until it tears. One company published that the breaking strength of a 3-inch sample should never be less than 150 pounds. Remember, leather is just SKIN. So how can skin hold up against so much force? Well, because of its construction. Firstly, a bit about skin: not all skin is the same thickness. The skin of the foot or the back is 4 millimeters thick, while the skin of the genitals and eyelids is way thinner. In that cross section, there are three layers: the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis -- but the dermis is the thickest.
When you stretch your skin (like this) Hey, I'm kinda stretchy! You'll feel it pull back on you because of the 'type 1' collagen: a super-common coiled triple-helix protein. The stuff that lets it bounce back is called elastin: a network of fibers that help with, what else, skin elasticity (helping it hold its shape when it's stretched or bent). But even though we knew all this, a new study in Nature Communications found out why it can stretch, but doesn't tear! They found that the skin's actual fibers will rotate, straighten, stretch and slide, to keep the skin from ripping! Skin evolved to try and spread the stress from a hole, notch, or tear! That's so crazy, right? Normally collagen is disordered and chaotic, spread randomly throughout in our skin, but when skin is pulled, stretched or hooked into some kind of horror gore torture device…
These spiraled collagen fibrils reorient themselves, and align along the pull, resisting a tear, and keeping the inside of your body protected! Researchers used rabbit skin, and a sophisticated synchrotron x-ray machine to watch the collagen in action, and postulated that this is also how our own stretchy stuff gets its pluck. According to their studies, understanding this behavior could help improve synthetic and flexible fabrics, which currently use stuff like wheat gluten. Gluten is like glue that holds bread together, and it doesn't tear easily either! Skin is more tear-resistant than gluten!? That's a weird fact. As long as we're facting it up: beauty products often say they have elastin in them, just like your skin, but it comes from cows or birds and if you rub elastin on your face, it still doesn't go under the epidermis into the dermis.
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