L’Oréal partners with Paris’ Musée de l’Homme for an immersive exhibition into human skin

Life shell, ID card, age marker, skin is the largest organ of the human body! By touching it, adorning it or perfuming it, it is so familiar to us that we think we know it well. But what do we know about the incredible biological adventure of the skin?

To answer these questions, L’Oréal, in partnership with the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle - Musée de l’Homme, has designed an exhibition offering an immersive dive into our largest organ.

“Forty years ago, some biologists took up the challenge of rebuilding human skin and the fruits of their research are there: decoding its color, understanding the impact of the sun’s ultraviolet rays, deciphering the mechanisms of aging, improving skin grafts for severe burns, replacing of animal testing, new approaches to rare diseases such as Moon children... The scientific adventure continues with the recent discovery of the microbiota, a carpet of microorganisms living on the surface, subjected to all the aggressions of the environment, a living barrier against infections that communicates with the intestine and the brain,” said the exhibition organizers.

The exhibition Dans Ma Peau takes the visitor on an immersive journey, mixing sensory experiences, projections and novel devices.

It offers a few surprises: discover the skin from the surface to the cell, identify your own skin colour in a nuancier of possibilities, discover the fascinating complexity of this fifth sense which is based on multiple receptors, understand the resources of this prodigious organ that researchers have rebuilt to help save lives, repair the body... and make us feel better about ourselves.

In addition to Dans Ma Peau, the Musée de l’Homme also shows the Piercing exhibition, which offers on 200m2 an anthropological point of view on piercing, mixing artistic representations, prehistoric objects, photographs and jewels, the exhibition presents piercing practices for 45,000 years. Different traditions will be discussed: Kayapos from Brazil, the Dayaks of Borneo, "Modern Primitives" in the United States... to the contemporary uses.