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Skin Facts
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- On average, your epidermis (the outermost layer of skin) regenerates every 27 days (14 days for a 20 year old, 37 days for a 50 year old)
- This process is most intensive at night, with cell regeneration taking place 8 times faster between the hours of 2 and 3 a.m., than during any other time of day
- As the skin regenerates, it sloughs off dead cells amounting to approximately one gram per day. During the average lifetime, you will lose approximately 44 pounds of skin.
- There are 3,900,000 cells per square inch of skin.
- Your skin is a major sensory organ and contains 32 feet of nerves per square inch.
- Your skin has over 8 feet of blood vessels per square inch.
- Your epidermis accounts for only 10% of your skin mass.
- Your skin continues to grow after your muscle, fat, and skeletal structures begin to deteriorate.
- One square inch of skin contains 95-100 sebaceous (oil) glands, 9,500,000 cells, 650 sweat glands, and 65 hairs.
- The skin responds to five basic sensations: pressure, touch, cold, heat, and pain.
- Skin varies in thickness from a twelfth to a fifth of an inch.
- Skin is the thinnest on the eyelids and thickest on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet.
- Things that adversely affect your skin include: excess of heat and cold, pollutants (free-radical damage), UVA and UVB sun damage, and smoking and intrinsic aging.
- Sun damage – average solar damage takes between 15 and 20 years to show the effects. Intense solar exposure can cause visible damage even earlier.
- We receive more than 80% of damage from the sun be fore the age of 18.
- 45%-50% of all Americans who live to the age of 65 will develop skin cancer at least once.
- Smoking – causes huge levels of free-radical damage. A single puff contains one hundred quadrillion free-radicals (more than one for every cell in the body). These free-radicals bind to our proteins and fats, causing tissue damage.
- Alcoholic Beverages – ingesting more than .08 ounces of alcohol (a 16-ounce beer) can be deleterious and negate efforts to treat or prevent wrinkles.
- Your skin begins to age when a person reaches 25, when hormone levels begin to decrease. Moisture content goes down, cell division slows, skin renewal decelerates, and oil secretion declines. By the time we reach 60 years old, we are able to make only about one-half of the necessary functional proteins we made when we were 20.
- In addition to anti-aging skincare regimes, good nutrition, water consumption, sunscreen, exercise, and adequate rest act to counteract skin damage.