I’m not one of those people who believe scars are badges of pride that tell someone’s life story. I’d rather that my past be unknown if I could have perfectly smooth skin in return. Fat chance—my entire body is a road map of raised marks, discolorations, and unsightly gouges that give away my entire history. There’s the divot where I got twelve stitches after the fin of my surfboard took a bite out of my thigh. There’s the chicken pox mark on my forehead that I’ve had since I was four, as well as a ridge under my chin that I acquired that same year after I fell in the bathtub. There are the matching brown marks on the insides of my wrists from the times I’ve singed my skin on the rim of a hot cookie sheet. And there’s my newest scar—a raised, mottled mess on my knee from a recent close encounter with a coral reef in Mexico.
So there you have it—if you ever meet me, you’ll find me immensely boring because you’ll already know everything about me. If you want to sustain your aura of mystery, you’ll need to be more vigilant than I’ve been about protecting your skin from injuries and taking care of it when you do have a wound. The best way to accomplish these goals is to spend your days in a padded room and never expose your skin to sunlight, but in the interest of having a little fun once in a while, you can also educate yourself about what causes scars and how you can treat them.
Skin Deep
The word scar derives from the Greek word eschara, which (appropriately) means “place of fire.” Scars are collections of fibrous tissue that develop naturally during the body’s healing process after the dermis, the inner layer of skin, is injured. In order to bridge the dermal gap the wound leaves, the body produces an abundance of collagen fibers, but it cannot replicate the exact appearance of the skin prior to the injury. As a result, while scar tissue gets the job done in terms of resealing torn flesh, its quality is inferior to that of skin, which is the largest single human organ. (Picture trying to patch a hole in a pair of your favorite jeans—the patch may reinforce the torn area, but it never perfectly matches the original denim around it.) Not only is scar tissue not identical to the skin surrounding it, but sweat glands and hair follicles have no hope of developing in it, and scar formations in the cardiac muscle that occur after a heart attack can weaken the muscle and even lead to heart failure in the worst cases.
