20 Things You Didn't Know About... Skin

1 It's your body's largest organ, despite what the readers of Maxim think.

2 An average adult's skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.

3 The skin releases as much as three gallons of sweat a day in hot weather. The areas that don't sweat are the nail bed, the margins of the lips, the tip of the penis, and the eardrums.

4 Ooh, that smell: Body odor comes from a second kind of sweat—a fatty secretion produced by the apocrine sweat glands, found mostly around the armpits, genitals, and anus.

5 Yum! The odor is caused by bacteria on the skin eating and digesting those fatty compounds.


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