The Big Book of Gross Stuff

by Bart King

  France is thought of as having a refined and civilized culture. This can make people think the French are snobs. Even the French sometimes think they’re snobs! Take French wine, for example. Jean-Marc Speziale is a French winemaker who heard one too many times from his countrymen that the wine from his region of the country tasted like merde (poop).

  So Jean-Marc started bottling his own wine: Le vin de merde, or “wine of the poop.” (The label on the bottle shows a large fly at the top right-hand corner!)

  The Skin You’re In

  You’ve got guts.

  And that’s why you should rejoice in your skin! After all, your skin is the only thing keeping all of the oozing, pulsating guts and goop inside you from slopping into a big wet pile on the ground. (Boy, that was a fun sentence to write!)

  And if you think about what’s underneath it, your skin is your least disgusting feature. But we’re more self-conscious about our skin than, say, our lungs. That’s because everyone can see our skin. So even though it’s not very gross, if our skin gets a little rash or a teensy zit, or maybe a medium-size cyst or boil, we freak out and think we look worse than we actually do.

  Hey, have you ever noticed that if you scratch a bug bite too much, your fingernails can raise a welt on your skin? Me too! There’s a woman named Ariana Page Russell who has such sensitive skin, it will immediately swell up at the slightest scratch. Then the skin shrinks back down pretty quickly. Because of this superpower, Russell calls herself “the human Etch A Sketch” and actually scratches patterns on herself to create art. Then she takes pictures of the art and sells it. Good for the human Etch A Sketch for being creative with her skin condition!

  Since you’re a mammal, you have hairs sticking out of your body. (If you are NOT a mammal, please e-mail me a description of what you actually are!) At the root (or follicle) of each hair are two or more oil glands. These glands are in charge of keeping your hair lubricated with oil. That’s why your hair gets oily even if you don’t go outside at all.

  Most teenagers find that their bodies are making way more oil than before. (This is because their bodies are making hormones called androgens.) More oil? Not good! This oil traps dirt and also starts drying. This gunky mess can block the sweat pores of your skin. Pretty soon a lump forms. This lump is called a comedo, but it’s not funny. It’s from a Latin word meaning “fat maggot.” Uncool! The comedo might turn into a blackhead, which is a zit with a black head. (Duh!) Squeezing the blackhead will often push out a tendril of yellow wax. Blech! That’s the dried grease that got trapped in your skin.

  Bizarre Bezoars

  When a cat licks its fur, some of the fur goes into its mouth and gets swallowed. But hair can’t be digested, so it just sits in the cat’s stomach, waiting for other hairs to join it. And at some point, the ball is big enough to get yacked up!

  If you think that’s bad, human hairballs are much worse. Some people—usually young people with long hair—develop the nervous habit of hair chewing. And just like cats, a hairball forms, but with humans we call them bezoars. While the stomach can’t digest this hairball, it can turn it into what looks like an odd-looking rock. In fact, people used to think that bezoars were rocks. They were believed to have magic properties and were even used as an antidote for poison.

  What about whiteheads? Gee, I was hoping you wouldn’t ask. The recipe for this classic zit calls for a blocked sweat gland that’s infected with bacteria. Your immune system sends white blood cells to the area to take care of the germs. A nice little soup of pus is made, and ta-dah! A zit is born!

  Since teen boys make ten times the amount of androgens as teen girls, boys are ten times more likely to get really bad acne.

  Bad Skin, Boils, and Communism!

  A colossal zit is called a sebaceous cyst. These can be an inch or more across! And because of their size, they can leave permanent craters behind if someone tries to pop them. So leave the cysts to the experts. A doctor will carefully lance the cyst. This is extremely gross. I observed it once, and the cyst actually made a deep popping sound!

  If you think a cyst is serious, you’re right. The only thing worse is a boil, which is a super-cyst. And if a bunch of boils grow near each other and connect up, that’s called a carbuncle. It’s one of the worst things that can happen to your skin. Let’s just say that it involves a lot of pain, swelling, and pus. And when a carbuncle pops, the skin over it comes right off and is replaced by an open sore.

  The writer Karl Marx came up with a social system called Communism, in which everyone would share property and get paid based on what they actually needed. But according to Marx, in order for the system to get started, there first had to be a war between the rich and the poor.

  If this sounds like a bad way to start a new society, I should mention that Marx suffered from extremely painful boils for most of his life. Unfortunately, he had a skin disease called Hidradenitis suppurativa, which turns the skin into a mix of pus-leaking blackheads, zits, and cysts. One skin doctor (aka, dermatologist) thinks that this painful condition made Marx an angry and alienated man, and this led him to write about Communism in the first place! In 1867, Marx wrote that his enemies “will remember my carbuncles until their dying day.” Yikes.

  Ugly Marks vs. Beauty Marks

  Moles are sometimes called “beauty marks.” I’ve always thought this was sort of cheap. Sure, if a mole is on a beautiful person it can be a beauty mark.[14] Otherwise it’s just a mole!

  No matter what your skin color is, you have a pigment in it called melanin. It’s what gives your skin its color. (Albinos don’t have melanin, but everyone else does.) Melanin is responsible for tanning any skin that gets exposed to sunlight. If melanin doesn’t spread evenly in your skin but instead clusters in one spot, that’s how you get a mole.

  Moles are weird. Babies usually don’t have any, but as people age, moles start cropping up. Some moles come and go pretty quickly, while others hang on for as long as forty years. And they come in ALL sizes. Their shapes can vary, too. Some moles stick out from the skin, while others are so flat, they are just like freckles.

  The worst moles are the ones with hairs sticking out of them. Urk!

  Thick-Skinned?

  Your skin may seem thin, but it’s actually quite leathery. That’s how ancient Aztec priests were able to make cloaks from the skin of people who’d been sacrificed to their gods. Speaking of skin removal, when Cardinal Lagrange of France died in 1402, the folks in charge of his body had a really gross job: they had to de-bone the Cardinal! The religious leader had insisted that his bones be buried at Avignon, but he wanted his skin and everything else left inside it to be buried at Amiens. (As you can guess, the Cardinal was not exactly a fun person. One of his tombs was inscribed, “Wretch, why are you so proud? You are nothing but ashes, and will, like me a fetid corpse, be food for worms.”)

  Dandruff

  Since many skin cells only live for three days, dead skin is falling off you all the time. That’s why bald people are lucky. Not only are we (oops, I mean “they”) more intelligent than most people, but bald people also usually don’t have dandruff problems. That’s because hair is what keeps dead skin cells from falling away from the body, and especially the head. Instead, the dead cells get clustered together, and then they break off in big chunks of dandruff, or “seborrheic scruff,” as the doctors call it.

  Of course, you have dandruff falling off your whole body. About 80 percent of the dust in your house comes from dead skin cells, and if you saved all of your cells, you’d end up with about forty pounds of dead skin in your lifetime!

  Fungus!

  Do you ever jam your toes? Probably! Your feet are packed with more sweat glands then you can imagine, and they are constantly sweating. That means dirt, dead skin, and lint (from your socks) is going to gather in the wet spots between your toes. And there’s your toe jam right there! (For fun, collect the lint from the dryer. Pull it apart and stuff it into a glass jar. Label it “Toe Jam” and put the
jar in the refrigerator next to the jelly.)

  Another problem your feet may run into is fungus. Most fungi like warm, wet places, and your feet probably qualify. Once you get some foot fungus, you’ll notice an itching. This will be followed by scaly, raw skin, and sometimes blistering. By then you’ll definitely want to do something about it!

  This type of fungus can grow pretty much anywhere on your skin, but your feet and groin are the most likely spots. The worst part of foot fungus is when it gets underneath the toenail, which is, unfortunately, a GREAT hiding place. Once the fungus gets a toehold there (oh, snap!), it can take years to get rid of it.

  Of course, if all these disgusting foot problems are too much for you, just go barefoot (or wear sandals a lot). After all, the only reason lint and fungus hang around your tootsies is because you’re constantly enclosing them in little greenhouses: socks and shoes!

  While you’re staring at your feet (hey, how can you read this then?), you may see a callus someday. This is where the skin gets really thick, usually because of friction with a shoe. (Corns are sort of like mini-calluses.) Perhaps, like me, you have seen people grind away at their calluses with emery boards. This rubs bits of ground-up skin off the foot and into the air around the person who is grinding.

  Keep away from these people!

  Blisters

  Some words are just perfect. I mean, the sound of the word perfectly matches its definition. Blister is like that; just looking at it makes me feel hot and, uh, blistery. You can get a blister if your skin gets rubbed too much (from yard work), or if your skin touches something really hot (from kitchen work), or even if you touch something really cold (from polar ice-cap work).

  Do you know the difference between small blisters (vesicles) and big blisters (bullae)? Size! But no matter how big, the blisters will probably fill with a watery fluid that is mostly plasma. That’s the stuff in your veins that your red blood cells float in. Plasma is actually sort of yellowish, but you don’t notice it when you get cut because your red blood cells get all the attention.

  Here’s what’s weird, though: a blister doesn’t form UNDER your skin. Nope, it forms BETWEEN your skin! You see, your skin has layers. On the outside is the outer skin (epidermis), which is actually pretty much dead skin. It protects your inner skin (dermis), which is where your living skin cells are, along with blood vessels and nerves. And below both of these is the subcutaneous layer, which is where your skin’s glands are. So when a blister fills with fluid, it’s cushioning and protecting the dermis and subcutaneous layers from any damage.

  And that’s why you shouldn’t pop a blister! If you wait to let the blister pop naturally, you’ll give your skin time to repair itself.

  Warts and All

  There is a simple beauty to a wart. That’s because you get warts by touching warts. So if you don’t WANT a wart (and I’m guessing you don’t), don’t touch a wart!

  Warts are spread by little skin viruses. And I think you already figured out where these skin viruses hang out: ON WARTS! If you’re in a locker room and someone with warts on his feet is walking around barefoot and then you walk around barefoot behind him, you can get warts too!

  Once one of the wart viruses lands on your skin, it tricks your skin cells into multiplying. That’s all a wart is: too many skin cells. Stupid, huh? But once you have a wart, try not to touch it. It’s usually best to just leave it alone. Most warts won’t hang around forever. My theory is that they’re just playing a little joke on you and your skin, and once the joke doesn’t seem funny anymore, the wart moves on!

  Scabies: A Combination of Scabs and Rabies?

  You just know that anything that rhymes with “rabies” is going to be bad, right? Scabies is a skin disease involving itching and red spots. It’s caused by insects called “itch mites.” I told you it was bad!

  These mites like to tunnel under a person’s skin (especially between their fingers) and hang out, lay eggs, and basically make trouble. When the eggs hatch, little larval itch mites (like tiny caterpillars) grow up and are quite happy to jump onto new people to continue this cycle. To stop them from doing this, the infected person has to commit larvicide.[15]

  B.O. and Other Stinks

  For two long years, Swiss researchers sweated it out over a problem that has continually haunted mankind:

  Do men and women have the same B.O.?

  The answer is no. It turns out that men’s armpits usually smell like gouda cheese. Women’s underarms smell like onions. And if you think you like the smell of cheese more than onions, you’d better like it a LOT more, because men sweat about 40 percent more than women.

  A lot of a person’s body odor comes from sweat. Since humans come equipped with about two million sweat glands, there’s a whole lot of stinking going on. If you could harvest pure sweat, it wouldn’t be a clear fluid. Nope, it’d look sort of like watered-down milk! And even if all you do is just sit around, you’ll still sweat just over a pint of this “milk” every day. Some of the things in your sweat are water, salt, and a waste protein called urea. All of these are also found in your pee!

  Of course, humans use deodorants to mask their cheese and onion smells. But not so fast! It turns out that when a man puts on deodorant, he is only able to mask his B.O. from other men. That’s because women have the ability to detect a person’s underarm odor beneath his or her deodorant. It’s true! So remember to take a quick shower if you reek. And if you still stink, reach for one of these words to describe your aroma: fetid, nauseating, rancid, revolting, sickening, stink-tacular, or vile.

  “Waiter, My Soup Smells Like Sweat!”

  French onion soup comes with melted cheese on top. It’s sweaty-licious!

  The Grossest Sport of All

  You probably think of your own sweat as somewhat gross. And as for other people’s sweat, puh-leeze. So, thinking about sweat, what do you think is the grossest sport of all? If you ever run in a marathon, the people running around you are practically spraying sweat out of their bodies. And in wrestling, two sweaty people rub their B.O. all over each other.

  But I think hockey takes the prize for Stinkiest Sport. Hockey players wear a lot of padded equipment, and then they race around the rink in it. And once that B.O. smell gets in the pads, it’s not coming back out! Hockey gloves smell so bad that players who want to be jerks give their opponents a “face wash.” This is done by pushing a stinky glove into another player’s face!

  Your Nose: An Owner’s Manual

  Right now, you might be trying to remember a time when you smelled a person’s B.O. Was it cheesy or oniony? But restrain any impulse you have to smell the osmidrosis in someone’s armpit right now. I give this warning because some people like to test out just how horrible a bad smell can be.

  This behavior has been around for a long time. In 1558, a man named Giovanni della Casa begged his fellow Italians to stop pointing out disgusting things for others to smell. He wrote that a person should not ask, “I should like to know how much that stinks,” when it would be much more proper and polite to say, “Because it stinks, I will not smell it.”

  But how do we know if something even stinks in the first place? Here’s how it works: molecules of the stinky stuff break off and hover in the air. Imagine a molecule of cheesy B.O. breaking off from someone’s armpit. Let’s say this B.O. molecule travels up some lucky human’s nostril (woo hoo!). Up, up, and way up into the nose it goes, until it eventually comes to a patch of dark yellow skin covered with a little mucus. This is where the smell receptors (called dendrites) are. The B.O. molecule lands on the mucus and goes through it. Then the dendrites (which are tiny and sort of hairy-looking) sense the molecule. The dendrites get a “reading” of it and send a message to your brain: cheesy!

  Besides your underarms, the heaviest concentration of sweat glands is in your crotch. That’s TWO bad smells combining for evil! Luckily, Japanese scientists have come up with cutting-edge underwear (ouch!) that can deal with this problem. Named “J-ware,�
�� these undies are designed to dry quickly and kill bacteria. And since bacteria are the culprits for making things stink, these are stink-free underwear! Miracle of miracles!

  The Greatest Stink of All

  Kailash Singh of India has not washed for thirty-five years! He made a promise not to bathe until all the problems confronting his country end. So it might be a while before he breaks out the bubble bath.

  Snot and Boogers

  The ancient Greek named Hippocrates is honored today as the “Father of Medicine.” Wow! I’d be happy just to be known as the “Cousin of Cough Syrup.” As a measure of the great influence of Hippocrates, today’s doctors must make a promise called the “Hippocratic oath.” (This includes the famous line “First, do no harm...”)

  So how wise was Hippocrates? Well, he believed that one of the main functions of the brain was to make snot.