Thickest on the palms of our hands and on the soles of our feet and thinnest on our eyelids, our skin is constantly being rubbed off and replaced by cells that migrate from the deeper layers of the epidermis. Unlike most mammals, we are relatively glabrous, or hairless, which allows for more efficient evaporation of our sweat, and so assists in the regulation of our body temperature. Embedded in the skin, and growing through it, are hair, nails, and sweat glands. Buried within it are blood and lymph vessels, nerve endings, sebaceous glands, and tiny involuntary muscles attached to our hair follicles.
Our skin envelops us, acting as a barrier against invading microbes and chemical irritants. It protects the underlying tissue from injury and infection, helps to regulate the body’s temperature, and alerts the body to environmental factors through its nerve endings: too hot, too cold, too toxic, too sharp—the skin alerts us to the dangers, and the comforts that surround us.
Surprisingly tough yet vulnerable, the skin is a frail and all-too-penetrable veil: blades can slice it, fire can burn it, and toxic substances can be absorbed through it. The loss of a substantial amount of our elastic armour will kill us, rendering us unable to regulate our temperature or block bacteria intent on colonising the warm, wet recesses of our susceptible body. Breach it and we bleed.
You only have to see the pulse beneath a baby’s fontanelle, where the skull bones are yet to fuse, or the subtle but continuous beat of blood coursing through the carotid arteries at the throat to have the vulnerability of the body’s first line of defence impressed upon you. The merest nick of knife—yes, it would have to be well placed—could see our life drain away, leaving nothing but a dry husk.
Because of this vulnerability, is it any wonder then that few of us ever really feel comfortable just in our own skins? We spend most of our lives draped in clothes; poor, naked, hairless apes we are without them.
The skin is a border, and one that is usually heavily protected and shielded from view, and from the elements. Even the triangles of skimpy bathing suits worn on beaches lend a modicum of defence. Not only does one feel less exposed in the obvious way when one is clothed, but also more veiled at a metaphysical level.
Visually, as well as in a tactile sense, our edges are blunted and muffled when we are dressed. Naturalists are a minority, although most of us have dared the pleasure of skinny-dipping at some point in our lives. There is an abandon associated with nudity, a reckless joy exhibited by streakers at the cricket and by the whoops of bathers plunging naked into the ocean.
Of course, it is also the flagrant display of sexual organs that excites and titillates, not simply the unimpeded view of the skin. Still, it is slightly bewildering that public nudity is viewed as anarchic and an effrontery that warrants being arrested.
I didn’t brave the cold and dark on the day that the photographer Spencer Tunick came to Melbourne in 2001 to photograph the bare bodies of the city’s citizens as they lay on Princess Bridge. Tunick is famous for his photos, taken all over the world, of groups of humanity in the altogether, lying on city streets or standing in orderly, terraced rows along roads, crowding the upward curve of a pedestrian bridge, or lying on their sides before the looming bulk of an enormous ship. In Tunick’s images, the variations of skin colour follow the curves and hollows of the bodies in stark opposition to the unyielding urban surfaces that they are often juxtaposed against.
Watching an edited video of the Melbourne shoot on YouTube, I found it inexplicably moving to see the mass of people—thousands of them—bare-arsed and happily excited in the muted dawn light, stampeding past the ladder on which the artist was perched with his loudhailer. They dropped onto the cold, wet road at his shouted instruction, but before the photo could be taken a man (fully clothed) ran into the shot bearing a large handwritten sign that echoed the words he chanted, ‘All men will bow to the name of Jesus Christ.’
‘God sent us into the world naked,’ one of the participants shouted back as the police dragged the protester away. His remonstrations were akin to objecting to dancing on a Sunday: there was nothing less lewd than this crowd of adults in their birthday suits, grinning like children at a birthday party. I experienced a mild pang of regret that I hadn’t dropped my daks, and the rest of my gear, to pose stark-naked with the lot of them: solemn, ridiculous, exposed.
The exposure of nakedness is something we sometimes crave because of the intimacy that it can help us to forge with another person. When we take a lover, our most urgent impulse is to caress our beloved’s skin. We delight in the warmth of their body against ours, and explore their skin as if it were a wondrous new terrain. We seek to discover the blemishes as well as the beauty, eager to know their physical shell in intimate detail. We might pause in delight at their mouth, tracing the shape of their lips, marvelling at the difference in colour and texture. Gently, we circle their nipples with our tongues, smiling with delight as these highly sensitive areas of skin tighten and become erect.
According to our predilections, it may be the smoothness of the underside of our lover’s upper arm, the hairiness of other parts, or the contrast between the two that intoxicates us. In our desire to get even closer, we attempt to penetrate the barrier of the skin through deep kissing and sexual intercourse so that, literally and figuratively, our bodies are joined.
What would sex be if not for touch? At its most fundamental, sex is, after all, just rubbing your skin against someone else’s. The platonic idea of love is all very well, but who would give up the delicious sensation of sinking into another’s arms and feeling wholly embraced within their skin?
And it’s not simply the feel, but also the smell of another’s skin that can transport us. I can recall vividly the sweet sweatiness, completely devoid of staleness, exuded by a young man whom I studied with decades ago. On hot Brisbane mornings, he would arrive at college, having ridden his bicycle up the myriad hills of the western suburbs, and arrive in time for our first class of the day, wet and glistening, and smelling divine.
The touch of skin on skin is not just for lovers, of course. It is a delightful sensation at any age, and is essential to our physical and psychological development. Anxious parents of premature babies huddle beside humidicribs, gently reaching inside to stroke their tiny offspring’s bodies. Desperate to hold their babies, but prevented from doing so by the medical paraphernalia, they caress their infant in any way they can.
Babies denied touch at this early stage of life have lower growth rates and spend more time crying than babies who are touched. In most hospitals where pre-term babies are cared for, ‘kangaroo care’ is encouraged where possible. This involves placing the babies against their parents’ chests, inside the parent’s clothing, so that parent and baby are skin to skin. Not only does this help to calm the tiny newborns and promote development, it also helps mothers to feel more bonded to their babies, and to express more breast milk. In an article that I read promoting the benefits of such care for all newborns, not just those born prematurely, the baby, its skin pressed up against its mother’s, was described as being in its ‘natural habitat’.
As a toddler, my youngest son adored the feel of skin on skin. If he caught me having a quick siesta on the couch, he would leap on me, pulling up first my shirt and then his own. Smiling as he lay against me, the warmth of our two skins as they touched was always surprising and vital. I took an almost-guilty pleasure in the sensuousness of it. His skin was wondrous to me. So smooth, so even; I would find myself reaching out to touch it, stroke it, kiss it. It fitted him so perfectly, without a wrinkle; nowhere did it sag or pouch. His young, firm flesh pushed out against his velvety covering, which wrapped itself around him in a taut, tight embrace.
Our skin is the most outwardly reliable indicator of our age. As we grow older, our collagen fibres gradually lose their ability to bind water—a property that gives the skin its elasticity. As a result, wrinkles begin to proliferate. The skin also thins, and often lesions develop as a result of exposure to the sun. We can all look forward