We had a total of 13 people listening to Frances Gilbert giving the second part of her paper on The Science of Skin. Again, Frances enthralled us with her understanding of the subject. She started off by analysing some beauty products which claimed to eliminate wrinkles in skin, only to find that water and alcohol were the largest ingredients and then c she ontinued by looking the small print for their medical effectiveness. We were all astonished to find that the skin trials consisted of a mere 82 people who thought the creams made their skin feel smoother. This is totally different from serious medical trials covering tens of thousands of people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds So be warned!

Frances then made everybody use hand gel ( major ingredients alcohol and water) on their hands and rub it in for twenty seconds and then prepare to be asked at the end of the talk what we had experienced with these hand gels.

After a quick revision of the constituents of skin and the functions of various components so that we can sense, pressure and temperature, and cuts or damage, we moved onto electronic skin. here we learnt from Japanese researchers that materials had been developed which were stretchable, self-healing, semi-conducting polymer-based material (e-skin) with various electronic sensors being embedded into the polymeric skin to mimic the action of skin. These developments were directed toward prothesis applications so that artificial hands and fingers have a sense of touch and sensitivity. We saw on video demonstrations that the fingers on a hand hard could locate and pick up a hard ball or a soft ball without any problems.

Unfortunately at this stage, we can only stick electronic skin on to human fingers for a few days because the skin underneath the strip decays and the dead cells come away and the e-skin becomes detached .

Now back to the experiment. No, we did not have wrinkle -free hands b ut we all had experienced a cooling effect caused by the alcohol evaporating and not being absorbed into the skin. Thus alcohol addicts are not adversely affected by the application of hand gels.

Frances captured the spirit of u3a by making sure we Learn Laugh and Live

Trevor