Like the natural hides of other living forms— shells, husks, rinds, etc.— the skin and its extensions function primarily as an outer garment, an exterior structure engineered for a lifetime of rough duty. That they also largely determine our ideas of what it means to be a man or a woman, or beautiful, and also our awareness of race, is ironic, since the cells we see— hair, nails, those on the skins surface— are all dead, their own skin already lost.
— Barry Werth, The Architecture and Design of Man and Woman
