Something that I have wondered about for some time now.
The outer layer of human skin is dead. Right? So why doesn’t it decompose?
When you die, from what I understand, your outer dermis starts decaying in one day. Often it turns bluish green, probably from fungi already present in the atmosphere, I would assume.
Considering the aforementioned fact, why doesn’t this process ever happen when you’ve alive?
It appears that the outer layer of skin is not dead. You can read about it in this Wiki article:
It was previously believed that the stratum corneum was “a simple, biologically inactive, outer epidermal layer comprising a fibrillar lattice of dead keratin”. It is now understood that this is not true, and that the stratum corneum should be considered to be a live tissue.
