Finger facts
I have two questions actually. I was reading one of your magazines and I saw two things in the ‘Fast Facts’ section that confused me. 1. ‘Your palm and the underside of your fingers cannot tan.’ Why is this? 2. ‘You have no muscles in your fingers.’ How do I move my fingers? These are good questions, and ones that our Fast Facts are designed to make you think about. For your first question, the palms of your hands and bottom of your feet both remain pale no matter how tanned the rest of your body may become. This is because the skin on human hands and feet is thicker, stopping the same amount of UV light from reaching the layers beneath. Your bewilderment at the second fact is also understandable, as we use muscles for all physical movement. The difference in our fingers is that the muscles used to move them are found in the palm and the forearm, not the fingers themselves. There are tendons in the fingers to relay this movement.