Dip your hands in water long enough, either while washing dishes or clothes, and you will notice the skin on your hands has become wrinkly! That’s so very true! I can hear you gasp.
But have you ever wondered why this is especially so, considering how skin covering the rest of your body and which you bathe with water daily doesn’t react this way? Worry your fine head no more, there’s an explanation.
It so happens that some parts of the human skin, better known as glabrous skin, have a unique response to water. Unlike the rest of the body, the skin of our fingers, palms, toes, and soles wrinkles after becoming sufficiently wet. Five minutes or so will usually do the trick.
In 2011, neurobiologist, Mark Changizi of 2AI Labs in Boise, Idaho, United States and his colleagues found evidence that wrinkled fingers act like rain treads, meaning that they channel water away from the fingers and toes during wet conditions allowing primates – humans and macaque monkeys to be specific – maintain tighter grips.
And what’s more? These wrinkles do not appear until around five minutes of constant exposure to water, meaning that incidental contact isn’t enough to result in wrinkling. The response only becomes useful in rainy or dewy conditions, or after a prolonged dip of these body parts in water.
Also, it occurs far more quickly in response to freshwater than seawater, which shows just why primates are the only species known to date to exhibit this phenomenon seeing that they live on land.
Oh! the things Science will teach us.
