Y​our body hair may be helping you experience gentle touch better than your own skin!

If you've had a loved one delicately run their fingers along your skin and worried that they might dislike your hair, you might want to hold off on any prompt plans to viciously shave it all off. Your body hair may be part of the reason you experience touch so intimately, a study has found.

In the past, people thought that our sense of touch mainly came from nerves in our skin and hair. But a recent study challenges this idea and says that our body hair might be more important for feeling gentle feelings.

The study found that hair follicles have more touch-sensitive receptors in their outer root sheath (ORS) compared to skin cells. When you touch something, these ORS cells send signals by releasing chemicals like serotonin and histamine to communicate with nearby cells. This is something we didn't know about before.

What's interesting is that while both skin cells and ORS cells release histamine, ORS cells release a lot more serotonin, which suggests that body hair plays a unique role in feeling delicate touches. We still don't know why this happens, and researchers want to find out.

Also, because histamine is linked to skin problems like eczema, this research could help improve treatments and ways to prevent these issues. Plus, it might make us appreciate our body hair more since it seems to be important for feeling gentle touches.

The findings of this research have been published in Science Advances and can be accessed here.