Silver skin

kw: medicine, skin conditions

A little item in Ripley's Believe it or Not: Seeing is Believing impelled me to learn more about Argyria, a condition in which ingestion of silver salts or colloidal silver leads to silvery skin. According to an article at BryanLGH College of Health Sciences, the condition is permanent.

That makes me wonder. The Ripley's item was about a Vermont woman who has had silvery skin for fifty years. Our skin is replaced completely every month, so the silver must migrate downwards as old skin is sloughed off, or it would soon be eliminated, wouldn't you think? Aha, but that is just the epidermis. The dermis is another story, and it must be there that the silver lodges.