Why is most skin on your body “elastic” but other skin is not like your ears, nose and fingers?

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Why is most skin on your body “elastic” but other skin is not like your ears, nose and fingers?

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are many reason for that, the main one being the Elastine protein. The more you have it, the more elastic your skin is. It vary from people to people and from organ to organ, but your skin have the ability to expand and to retract more or less. It is not a perfect molecule, and it fails from times to times (rapid weight/height gain for example, cause stretch marks because the skin won’t expand ad vitam eternam, causing some lesions that cause those stetch marks).

Now, the practical reasons are quite easy: if that body part is going to move and/or expand, it have to be stretchable. that’s why the tummy, the articulations (including the fingers) and the sex (be it male or female) have a lot of Elastine, and ears don’t.