It is always an uncomfortable feeling when you’re in the shower and look at your hands and they look like a wrinkly mess. Or when you go in the swimming pool for so long that you feel like your fingers are becoming deformed. But why does this happen to our hands, toes, and fingers when we spend too much time in water? Is there a reason that our fingertips get pruney? What makes our fingers go back to normal? These are all interesting questions that science can answer.

So, what is science’s explanation for our fingers getting wrinkly when wet? According to Becky Summers and Nature Magazine, “Laboratory tests confirmed a theory that wrinkly fingers improve our grip on wet or submerged objects, working to channel away the water like the rain treads in car tires.” With this in mind we can assume that our fingers aren’t swelling for no reason and that there is a primary function for the pruniness. Recently, scientists have studied this function as a way of gripping things when our skin is wet. Participants in the study picked up wet or dry objects with normal hands or with wrinkled fingers. The results, published in Biology Letters, suggested that the subjects were faster at picking up wet objects with wrinkled fingers than with dry ones.

Now that I know why our skin does this, I keep asking myself how it does it. The outermost part of everyone’s skin is covered in transparent oil called sebum. The job of this oil is to moisturize and lubricate the skin in order to make it waterproof. Once people spend a large amount of time in water, the oil washes away, causing our skin to puff up and appear wrinkly.

The only known way to get rid of pruned skin is to simply get out of the water and dry your skin with a towel.   With this in mind, it is important to make sure your skin doesn’t get dehydrated. Since the oils that allow our skin to be dehydrated washed away, it is our job to reapply moisturizer to our skin. For example, after your get out of the shower and your hands feel dry, it’s the best idea to moisturize. Some people thing that washing your hands can get rid of the dry feeling, but in reality you are probably making your hands drier. In retrospect, it is best to dry your skin with a towel and moisturize the spots that were wrinkled to help bring your skin back to normal.