Why your fingers get wrinkly in water
We've all seen it happen when soaking in the bath or after a long day in the pool, but have you ever thought of why your skin does this?
Everyone has experienced the raisin finger phenomenon.
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As kids, you might even say, you have old people's hands.
Most of us will also admit that we have not really considered why this happens or thought more than a few seconds about it before our hands go back to normal.
It turns out that there is a scientific and evolutionary reason for our fingers going wrinkly.
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In 2003, neurologists Einar Wilder-Smith and Adeline Chow were working on getting to the bottom of this age-old phenomenon while at the National University Hospital in Singapore.
During their study, they had volunteers soak their hands in water and took measurements of the blood circulation in their hands and noticed there was a noticeable drop in the amount flowing to the fingers.
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Nick Davis (neuroscientist and psychologist at Manchester Metropolitan University) also started looking into this and enlisted the help of 500 volunteers who visited the Science Museum in London in 2020.
Measuring the difference between how much force they needed to grip onto an object when they had dry, unwrinkled hands and when they had wet, wrinkly hands, this showed that dry hands need less force to grip something than wet hands, but when they become wrinkly we also use less force.
It makes sense when you look at your fingers when they go wrinkly. The finger pads go pale and that is because the blood supply is being constricted away from the surface. The results were amazingly clear The wrinkling increased the amount of friction between the fingers and the object. What is particularly interesting is that our fingers are sensitive to this change in the surface friction and we use this information to apply less force to grip an object securely.
In the end, what this means is our ancestors might have been able to climb on wet rocks better or move things underwater easier.
Next time you are at the pool, the beach, or just chilling in your bathtub, you'll know exactly what's up.
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Main image courtesy of iStock/Iva Dimova