by Xosé Castro

Why does your skin wrinkle after you’ve been soaking in the bath for a while? Because water has soaked into the CALLUS on your skin, and made it swell up and wrinkle up. The CALLUS is usually thickest on your hands and feet.

    There are a few layers in your skin. The DERMIS underneath, and the EPIDERMIS on the outside. The epidermis of your skin is quite thin, from a 10th of a millimetre over the eyelids to more than l mm thick on the soles of your feet. The epidermis is full of skin cells, and it’s supported and nourished by the DERMIS underneath.
 There’s a non-waterproof layer of your skin - the thick layer of CALLUS that you generate on your feet (if you walk a lot), and use your hands alot When you’re in a bath for half an hour or so, water can soak into the CALLUS.
Unless you’re one of those religious people who crawls on your belly for hundreds of kilometres, you don’t have much CALLUS on your belly, which is why you don’t get a wrinkled belly when you soak in a bath.

So the reason that you wrinkle when you sit in water for a long time, is because the water soaks into any skin on your body that has lots of CALLUS on it.

Click on the link below to hear Emily tell us about those funny wrinkles we get on our fingers.  Don’t stay in the bath too long!

emilyg_wrinklefingers.mp3