I’m not really too sure about this in real life since I don’t see fights that often, but why do movies and cartoons show that? For example, I saw a cartoon where someone smacked the other person with a baseball bat. Suddenly they’re laying on the ground, bleeding on the back of the head.
I get areas where there’s a passage way like your nose, mouth, and even ears but why do random spots on the head bleed when no cuts were involved? How does the skin rips open after a big blow to it?
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Skin is fragile. Especially on the skull where there is not a whole lot of meat or fat to absorb the shock.
15 years ago or something I hit my head on a doorway jumping down stairs (don’t ask). It wasn’t even that hard all things considered. I didn’t faint or anything. But let me tell you I was pissing blood.
I hit my eyebrow against someone’s shin as a kid, got a real bad gash and needed stitches. The doctor explained it to me that the pressure and friction literally tore my skin over the ridge of my brow.
Our body is pretty squishy mostly, able to distribute blunt impact across thick layers of skin, fat, and muscle. But our faces are thin skin over angular bone, which makes it a lot easier to simply tear the skin and make it a pseudo-cut instead.
The fleshy bits on your head are thin with your skull right under it. You hit the thin squishy bits it has to go somewhere. Since it can’t go in with the skull in the way it goes sideways/outward from the impact point, and in the process it tears. On other parts of your body there’s more squishy bits. You may get bruising and bleeding internally but the skin itself isn’t pinched.
Something else that makes injuries on your head bleed more than on other areas is that you have a decent bit more blood vessels close to the surface. On other parts of the body the wider vessels are deeper in your body. But again on your head with the skull in the way there’s no deeper place for the thicker blood vessels to be.
It’s not really a cut it’s a *split*. Your skull bones are very hard and close to the surface with only a thin layer of skin and muscle over top. A hard impact even if it’s blunt can split the trapped skin because it has nowhere else to go.
Picture putting a slice of bologna on a rock surface and then hitting it with a bat or giving it a hard punch. Even though there’s nothing sharp to “cut” the bologna, it can split because it’s a soft thing being crushed between 2 hard objects so it has to split as it’s pushed out of the way.
Less cut than split or tear, depending on the nature of the hit. Skin is a marvelous organ, but ours isn’t all that thick and on your scalp it’s held fairly taught over the skull and shot through with a lot of vessels.
When you take a hit to the head, especially if you hit a narrow surface where all the impact is focused in a narrow area, it can take enough force that it is split apart. Other parts of your body generally have fat and muscle under them, and places like your elbows where it’s not true have less in the way of vessels close to the surface. But on your scalp there’s a lot of them and it’s pinched between whatever you hit and your skull so its easy to split.
If you catch a glancing blow hard enough it can also be torn. Its attached to the skull pretty firmly all the way through, and again the pinching plays in, so it can stretch and deform as easily as say…on your chest or stomach. So apiece caught by something may tear loose to provide that give since it can’t stretch and flex readily.
I don’t have an answer but I literally dropped my phone on my forehead four minutes ago and drew blood so was amused that this was in my feed.
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