How Important Is Your Skin To You?

Let’s all stop what we are doing at the moment and ask ourselves this question. A lot of people can easily come up with a million reasons why their brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys are so important but can hardly give more than two reasons when it comes to their skin. The good old skin! The one that protects other vital organs and keeps our   muscles and bones from hanging loose all over the place! What a gory sight that would have been.

However, something I believe we would all agree on is that the appearance of the skin can have a drastic effect on us physically, psychologically, socially etc. We can probably still remember some high school or college mates who had low self esteem because they had terrible skin conditions.

Here are a few of the major things how skin does for us:

  1. Protection: Your skin is your body’s first line of defense against external threats, such as sunlight, cold weather, dirt, dust and viruses. It provides your body with a robust barrier of protection from injury and infection.
  2. Sensation: Your skin is home to numerous nerve endings and receptors that sense changes and allow you to feel objects, sense pain and pressure and differentiate hot from cold. It might interest you to know that pain is not always a bad thing as the detection by the skin serves as a protective mechanism to help protect the body from harmful stimulus.  Hence, depletion in the integrity of the skin should always be avoided.
  3. Temperature control: The blood vessels, hairs and sweat glands in your skin play a vital role in managing your body temperature. When you are hot and need to cool down, the blood vessels in your skin expand and allow heat to escape. You also start sweating and your hairs lie flat to allow the escaping heat to pass out of the body. When you are cold and need to retain heat, the opposite happens. Your blood vessels tighten, you produce far less sweat and your hairs stand on end in an attempt to trap warm air around your body.
  4. Storage and synthesis: The skin acts as a storage centre for fat and water, as well as a means of synthesis of vitamin D by action of ultraviolet rays on certain parts of the skin.
  5. Aesthetics: Our skin portrays our mood, physical state and attractiveness which others can readily assess.

It’s quite evident that our skin works full time to protect and keep us healthy; hence we also have a responsibility to take good care of it. One of such ways to accomplish this is to schedule an appointment with our qualified team of aesthetic medicine and dermatology experts at Laserderm clinics.