5 Key Functions of Your Skin

Your skin is your body’s largest organ and it plays a vital role in maintaining your health and wellness. It’s wonderfully resilient and can survive a great deal of punishment. The skin is the body’s boundary layer, tough enough to resist all sorts of environmental assaults, yet sensitive enough to feel the slightest touch. The skin creates the first line of defense against possible invasion of bacteria and germs, while maintaining the body’s internal environment within a few degrees of normal throughout our lifetime. It also gives you ability to “sense” things. Following are the top 5 tasks or functions that your skin performs for your body and health:


1. Protection: Your skin is a unique and remarkable organ that is the outer covering of the body. Hence, your skin tries to protect you from germs that can make you sick. It also provides protection of deeper tissue from chemicals, bacteria, bumps, and drying.

2. Absorption & elimination: As the largest digestive organ of the body, the skin provides the functions of both absorption and elimination. This process can work for or against us, depending on the products we apply to the skin. Just like eating “junk food,” junk skin care products can produce negative effects. Conversely, eating a healthy organic diet and using healthy, organic skin care products as “skin food” will increase the health, beauty, and vibrancy of our skin.

3. Sensation: Our skin tells us how things feel when we touch them. For example, our skin can tell us when we are touching something dangerous (something really hot or sharp). One square inch of skin contains millions of cells as well as many specialized nerve endings for sensing heat, cold, and pain.

4. Regulation: Your skin also serves as a heat regulator; sweating when you are hot allows the water to evaporate and cool the skin. When your body is chilled, the vessels become narrowed and decrease the flow of blood through the skin to reduce heat loss.

5. Production: Your skin makes Vitamin D in response to sun exposure. Vitamin D is a crucial part of the way your body handles the essential nutrients calcium and phosphorus in your diet. As a result, it is critical to the development and maintenance of bone strength. The amount of vitamin D produced from sun exposure varies based on skin type, use of skin protection, length of sun exposure, season of the year, and time of day.

All in all, remember your skin is one of the key organs of your body that works hard for you day and night. You should, therefore, work hard to protect your skin by giving it best care and preventing it from various issues and problems such as acne.