Every other Friday, the Outside/In team here at NHPR answers listener questions.” Producer Taylor Quimby is itching to find an answer, and has this report. Taylor Quimby: People sometimes say, “the eyes are the window to the soul.” But our largest bodily organ and yes, the skin is an organ is more like a window into our neuroses. Mona Gohara: Skin-picking is a thing, not just with scabs, just in general. People, their anxiety lands on their skin and they pick. Taylor Quimby: This is Mona Gohara a board certified dermatologist and professor at Yale School of Medicine. Mona Gohara: they pick pimples, they pick scabs, they pick normal skin, they just pick everything. Taylor Quimby: And while it’s true that scabs are sometimes like fidget-spinners we toy with them because we can the most common reason we pick scabs is because they can be super freaking itchy! So what creates that itch? Mona Gohara: So when your skin gets injured, your body basically jumps into action. Taylor Quimby: A newly forming scab acts like a sticky mesh or tarp that covers the fresh wound. Mona Gohara: And that sticky mesh is essentially a net that traps blood cells, it dries out and becomes a hard crust. It’s basically your body’s built in band aid, made of, um, dried blood, platelets and fibrin. But just under the surface, there’s something else flooding the wound too. Susan Taylor: Immune cells, uh, come in to help fight infection because remember you fell down. It’s going to be dirty cement or dirt. Taylor Quimby: This is Susan Taylor, The Bernett Johnson Endowed Professor of Dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania. And besides fighting infection, she says those immune cells can have an unfortunate side effect: inflammation. Susan Taylor: I mentioned those inflammatory cells that are in the wound. They release mediators that cause itching. So it’s not the scab itself that causes the itching. It’s the healing wound that causes the itching. Right. But since the scab covers the wound, that’s what we’re going to tug at. Taylor Quimby: So that’s the basic answer. The itch that makes you want to pick doesn’t come from your scab it’s what’s going on underneath. And most of the time, it’s actually a sign the healing process is working.. Needless to say, dermatologists will tell you, you shouldn’t be picking scabs if you can help it. You want to give the skin underneath time to grow, and cover the wound. Susan Taylor: Remember, all of your skin cells we call those keratinocytes have been scraped off. So the skin cells at the edges are going to start migrating, moving towards each other to seal that up. Taylor Quimby: And once that’s done, the scab should dry up and flake away on its own. And you should feel victorious, for not succumbing to the itch. But Mona Gohara told me something else surprising: ideally, you don’t want a wound to form a scab at all. Mona Gohara: Honestly, I bet if you interviewed like 100 dermatologists, they would be like, oh, no scabs. We don’t want scabs. Taylor Quimby: Scabs may be the body’s natural band-aid. But Susan Taylor says you can form an artificial scab that’s going to heal the wound even faster. All you have to do is clean it gently, and cover it in something like Vaseline or Aquaphor. Susan Taylor: That is going to seal that wound. It’s going to provide a very slippery environment for those, uh, keratinocytes to migrate together. It’s going to seal out that external environment that’s susceptible to infections and all kinds of bacteria. Taylor Quimby: So whether you scraped your knee or nicked your finger here’s a handy rhyme to guide you: Keep it moist, clean, and covered in Vaseline. If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr. org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.
https://www.nhpr.org/2025-11-22/outside-inbox-why-do-we-pick-at-scabs
