In the West, where youth has become fetishised to an alarming degree, an entire industry is based on the desire to keep our skins as pristine as possible. We buy sunscreen to prevent damage, moisturisers to promote elasticity, and lather on anti-ageing creams in an attempt to repair the ravages of time. Paralysing toxins are injected into facial muscles to inhibit frowning and so display an unlined brow. We subject our skin to chemical peels in order to slough off outer layers and reveal newer skin cells beneath. In response to advertising that encourages dissatisfaction with our appearance, we lighten our skin or darken it with cosmetics and UV lamps.
According to fashion or custom, skin is daubed in colour or designs. Tattoos, piercings, and scarification are used as adornment, as a sign of cultural allegiance, or to hint at times of boredom spent in a correctional institution. We tussle with our skin, hide it, drape it, reveal it, or dab it with perfumes and deodorant in an attempt to camouflage our scent. We apply colour to our lips and faces for dramatic effect, striving to project the image of an ideal self—youthful, healthy, and confident—or to show that we are conforming to, or rebelling against, the expectations of society.
Yet our skin is not always a reliable ally—it can betray us, sending signals that belie our words, actions, or attitude. Apprehension, stress, or sexual attraction may cause our sweat glands to seep a watery fluid containing urea, minerals and amino acids. Glands in our armpits, on our faces, the mons pubis, nipples, and the scrotum ooze a milky, viscous liquid in response to emotional stimulus. A rush of blood to the face can signal our shame, arousal, embarrassment, or the fact that we have just told a lie. The cold sweat of fear, and the accompanying odours that spring unbidden from our pores, may alert a foe to our terror and give courage to their assault.
The skin is like a neon light, flashing signals that provide clues to our health, wealth, race, and occupation, and encouraging others to make assumptions about us. A tan line may define us as an outdoor worker, a stretch mark as a mother. In Aboriginal cultures, a boy’s transition to manhood might be marked physically on the body through scarification, while in India the shade of your skin might indicate your caste. Tightness around the temples may hint at a facelift, while a certain type of lesion on the skin known as Kaposi’s sarcoma could mark you as having AIDS. Strangers assess your skin and use the information found there to make judgements about your morals, your intelligence, and your worth.
In a number of cultural and religious traditions, one piece of the skin on the male body is deemed superfluous or even unclean: circumcision surgically removes the prepuce, or foreskin, the fold of skin that covers the head of the penis. The operation is usually performed soon after birth, although in some cultures it is done much later.
In recent years, circumcision has fallen from favour, deemed to be an unnecessary and painful operation. However, debate continues within the medical profession about the health benefits of removing this relatively small amount of skin, with some research suggesting that circumcised men are less likely to become infected with HIV Although male circumcision is a much less radical operation than the mutilation of female circumcision, there are still men who feel the loss of their severed foreskin keenly, and who seek to restore it through both surgical and non-surgical methods.
Jesus, a Jew, was circumcised. According to Christian tradition, Jesus ascended into heaven after his death, taking his body with him. This left his foreskin as the only relic of his physical body remaining on earth. At least 13 churches worldwide claim still to have this tiny relic. In one re-telling of the story of St Catherine of Sienna, she has a vision of marrying Jesus in a mystical union where he places a ring made from his foreskin on her finger. St Angela of Blannbekin, an Austrian saint who lived around the turn of the 14th century, claimed to have had a vision where she swallowed Christ’s foreskin. Apparently, it tasted intensely sweet. Like the air we breathe, we take our skin for granted. We seldom remark upon it except in the context of our collective phobia of ageing, fuelled and exploited by the cosmetics industry. Yet it is remarkable; it mitigates and ameliorates the sometimes-harsh world we dwell in, and is at the interface of so much of what we encounter. It is our border, the edge of ourselves, the point where we meet our universe.
I AM NOT AN ACADEMIC, a scientist, a doctor, or a cultural theorist. I am a writer who has become intrigued and captivated by the precariously thin veil of our epidermis, and how it mediates and facilitates our experience of the world.
This is by no means an attempt to write the definitive book on skin. Instead, it is a dalliance with that which wraps us up—a teasing out of some of the gruesome, visceral, personal, and interesting aspects of the human skin.
If I had to pinpoint one moment when the subject of skin became an obsession, I would not be able to do it. It was a gradual awareness that began perhaps when my children were born and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that it was their physical selves that I first bonded with. Our skins were our initial meeting place, and it is their enveloping skin that continues to enthral me. This fascination has, in part, been the starting point for my manuscript.
Once I embarked on the task of writing about skin, I came across newspaper and magazine articles almost on a weekly basis that referenced skin in some way: medical breakthroughs, streakers at the cricket, the horrific scarring of those injured in the Bali bombings, a footballer sledging an opponent about his tattoo, instances of racism, alarm about the dangers of tanning salons, and makeup tips of the rich and beautiful. In the face of such a barrage of topics into which to delve and research, I toyed with the idea of simply making lists: the top ten functions of the skin; aphorisms and literary quotes regarding skin; skin conditions you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy; the five ugliest tattoos I’ve ever seen ... But it became apparent that this would be a far too glib approach, especially when I began talking to people whose skin—or for whom the skin of others—loomed large in their life, their work, their emotions, or their art. For tattooists, burns surgeons, dermatologists, and those whose bodies wear the marks of the sustained assault of fire or disease, the skin is no small thing; it is integral to who they are and how they experience the world. This is true for all of us, of course, whether we are aware of it or not.
In the daily routine of human transactions—small and large, commercial or otherwise—our skins are the interface between us. Not only are our minds, through our skin, ‘brought into relation with external objects’, as described in that classic text Gray’s Anatomy, but, on a deeper level, it is through our skin that we connect to our world and the others with whom we share the planet. Apart from intestinal rumblings and the odd heart palpitation, the mind is aware of the body primarily through the skin.
When we touch another person—no matter how fleeting the contact—a bond is established or modulated to some degree: a perfunctory kiss between spouses; a passionate, full-body embrace in the pre-dawn; an overwhelming rush of love as a parent nuzzles their child’s neck; a press of the hand from a trusted friend. Other, more casual contacts also occur: a pat on the shoulder, a shake of the hand, a touching of palms as coins are exchanged or a credit card is proffered. Along the way, items are bought, deals finalised, respect given, emotions communicated, attention sought, and pain inflicted.
Skin, as burns surgeon Fiona Wood remarked to me, is ‘not just a plastic bag to keep our giblets in’. No, indeed: the skin is a parchment, a canvas, a prison, a barrier, a conduit, a revelation; like silk, like sandpaper, like flaky pastry; the colour of milk, of chocolate, of wheat, of burnt biscuits. As we go about our daily lives, we constantly brush up against our fellow human beings. Each of these individuals exists inside their own tenuous envelope: the only thing that separates them from the rest of the universe—their skin.
Touch Me
‘She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, her fingernails in circles raking his back.’
—The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
THE SKIN has a memory all of its own.
‘I remember that touch,’ a lover once said to me, recalling the first time I laid my hand on his arm. That small contact, weeks after we had first met, was enough to prompt him to ask me out. Some 18 years later, I still remember