Your Babies’ Skin is… Special!

18 September 2016

Moms, your beloved babies have a very soft and smooth skin. Baby skin has a few differences with a normal adult skin – which can increase your baby vulnerability to experience diaper rash.

  • The epidermis, or outer layer of your babies’ skin, is 20-30% thinner from adult’s skin, making it more vulnerable.
  • Babies’ skin is absorbing and losing moisture faster than adult’s skin.
  • External irritation can easily penetrate your babies’ skin, because their outer protective layer has not fully developed.
  • Friction from diaper makes it easier for babies’ skin to get irritated

 

Your Babies’ skin is far more fragile

Even though babies’ skin has many similarities with normal adult skin, there are some important differences. Both structural and functional characteristics of baby skin are very different from adult skin. This is the reason why your babies need different way to care and therefore have a different skin problem.

Anatomical differences between babies’ skin and normal adult skin can be seen in skin surface, skin layer development, distribution and size of certain glands, nervous system organization, blood vessels, and hair growth.

Moms, there are some functional characteristics that will make your babies more vulnerable to diaper rash :

  • On your babies’ skin, the dermis – a layer of skin that protects your body from stress and temperature change – is far thinner than normal adult skin. This is why your babies are far more vulnerable.
  • Baby skin is also more vulnerable to get an infection. Babies still haven’t developed a  fully-functioned protection skin to protect from certain bacterium yet, and they also haven’t developed a  fully-functioned immunity system to fight an infection.
  • Babies have an ability to reduce sweat better than normal adult.  It may affect their ability to lower body’s temperature through perspiration. Beside affecting metabolism process, decreasing ability to sweat may contribute to the appearance of rash.
  • Baby skin is vulnerable to an external irritation. This might be related to relatively higher fat content in their skin and therefore, any fat-soluble substances (which might contain irritant) can pass more easily through the skin. Friction between clothes and skin, diapers and skin, or the areas of skin folds can make the skin surface broken and making it easier for irritation cause to penetrate our beloved babies’ skin.

 

Hope this information is useful for you. Thank you for reading.