Your Skin: How It Grows

Your skin is an amazing organ. It’s constantly working – protecting your body from outside pollutants and keeping everything inside in. Plus it’s always growing and creating new skin. That’s the basics but, of course, there’s more to it. So here’s the details on your skin and how it grows.

1 Inch of Skin, Millions of Cells

Every inch of your body has about 19 million skin cells. And that’s not the only thing. For every inch of skin you have:

• 650 sweat glands
• 1,000+ nerve endings
• 60,000 melanocytes (this stuff make melanin which gives your skin its color)
• 20 blood vessels

Wow right?! Who knew how many things an inch of your skin holds?

Out With Old Skin, In With New Skin

Your skin replaces 30,000 to 40,000 old skin cells every day. Like I said, your skin works hard. It’s constantly working to make new skin cells to replace old ones.

Old skin cells, also known as dead skin cells, sit on top; the top 18 to 23 layers of your skin are actually dead cells. Who knew?

New skin cells are made at the bottom of your skin’s epidermis. As the old cells shed, the new cells rise to the top. For a refresher on all the layers of your skin check out our post: “Your Skin: It’s Many Layers”.

Interesting fact, the skin cells that you see at the start of the month will probably be gone by the end of the month. That’s pretty fast.

Your Skin

It’s always fun to learn a little bit more about ourselves. At Block Island Organics we love learning and talking about our skin because when we understand our skin, we can help keep it healthy for longer.

For even more tips and information on keeping our skin look its best check out our Skin Care, Education, or Suncare Smarts blog series.