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Mechanical Behaviour Assessment of the Skin

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Agache’s Measuring the Skin
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Abstract

Since the shape of the skin can be changed in different ways (stretching, torsion, compression, etc) and at different degrees, it is possible to impose the constraint preferentially on a given component and so to assess its behaviour independently. As a consequence, the assessment of the mechanical behaviour opens new fields of anatomical or functional investigation of theoretically all the various components of the skin, because every biological structure has a mechanical behaviour and because the latter plays a part of the overall skin behaviour. The main application of this assessment are the efficacy tests of cosmetics, anti-ageing products, measurement of UV impact, follow-up of skin sclerotic diseases (scleroderma, morphoea, radiodermatitis…), atrophies (from corticosteroids, in rheumatisms, striae distensae, etc …), diagnosis of connective tissue diseases (Ehlers-Danlos syndromes, elastic pseudoxanthoma, mid-dermis elastolysis, …), foresight tests in plastic and cosmetic surgery, characterisation of elasticity and viscosity of healthy or pathological skin and research in skin physiology.

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Agache, P., Varchon, D. (2015). Mechanical Behaviour Assessment of the Skin. In: Humbert, P., Maibach, H., Fanian, F., Agache, P. (eds) Agache’s Measuring the Skin. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26594-0_130-1

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