That's the why: Plenty of people harbour at least one scar on their skin, maybe from an old injury or surgery.
And while some people might dig them – according to rock’n’roll lore, anyway – if a scar is prominent it may be a feature that the bearer prefers to camouflage.
Why do scars appear so different? It’s because the scar tissue is not quite the same as the surrounding skin.
Generally, when your skin is damaged badly, cells of your body’s immune system rush in to keep potentially nasty bugs from gaining access through the wound.
As part of your body’s response to the injury, you can also produce fibrous connective tissue called collagen at the site, and these proteins eventually form the scar.
And because it doesn’t have the usual tissue architecture of “normal” skin, it doesn’t contain hair follicles, which can make the site of the gash even more obvious on some body parts.
Interestingly, a study presented at a US conference recently highlighted an approach that appears to prevent scarring – in an animal model at least.
In a news report in December for Scientific American, Carrie Arnold describes how researchers in Ontario, Canada, gave rats a protein that blocks some apparently key sugar molecules (fragments of hyaluronan, to be precise) from binding at the wound site.
This seemed to dampen down inflammation and the production of the fibrous proteins that would normally build up scar tissue.
