Why Do Paper Cuts Hurt So Much?
Science has fingered the reason, and you can thank evolution for the outsized throbbing
My sister needs a full-on body coat of bubble wrap before beginning her day. She is the type who gets zapped by the single-thorned rose. She never completes a scratch-off without incurring a paper cut, leaving her blood stains on the winning $4 ticket. Thing is, she’s an English teacher surrounded by stacks of papers to grade, so the threat is real. I received another text this morning. My thumb is throbbing from a new paper cut, and I have twelve more reports to grade!
Why do these razor-thin nicks, as if sliced by a mandoline, often bring us to our knees? As a dermatologist, I’ve tended plenty of paper cuts. So here’s the skinny:
The skin’s outer layer, the top one-eighth inch, is called the epidermis, and it contains the greatest concentration of nerve endings in the body, the sensory fibers that transmit pain. While, every square centimeter of your skin contains around 200 pain receptors, the hands and fingers concentrate the most of these little hot wires, approximately 3,000. Even a microscopic cut will slice through thousands of sensitive endings, which is why that tiny cut can cause as much pain as a larger gash.
