Not All Skin Is the Same: Study Reveals Differences Between Male and Female Skin

Why do skin wounds heal faster in females than males? A new study suggests that differences in skin stem cell activity, influenced by sex hormones, may help explain why female mice recover more quickly from skin injuries than males.

Published in the journal Nature, the study conducted by researchers at the Université libre de Bruxelles in collaboration with the University of Cambridge investigated how biological sex influences skin renewal, stem cell behaviour and wound healing.

Using advanced microscopy techniques, researchers tracked individual skin stem cells and their descendants in living mice for five months, allowing them to observe how cells divide, differentiate and maintain the skin's protective barrier.

The findings revealed striking differences between male and female mice. In females, sister cells produced from a single stem cell frequently made coordinated developmental decisions, either dividing again or differentiating into mature skin cells simultaneously.

In contrast, male skin cells showed less synchronised behaviour and tended to develop more independently.

Further experiments identified sex hormones as important regulators of these differences. Removing testosterone in male mice caused skin cells to adopt more female-like behaviour, while administering dihydrotestosterone restored typical male patterns.

Similarly, removing the ovaries in female mice reduced stem cell proliferation and disrupted cellular synchronisation. Treatment with estradiol, a form of estrogen, restored increased cell proliferation.

Importantly, researchers found that wounds on female mice closed substantially faster than those on males, particularly during the early stages of healing.

The faster recovery appeared partly associated with earlier stem cell activation and more coordinated cellular activity.

Laboratory experiments using reconstructed human skin also demonstrated that testosterone accelerated stem cell differentiation, suggesting that some mechanisms may extend to humans.

However, researchers cautioned that the wound-healing findings were demonstrated primarily in mice and require further human investigation.

REFERENCE: Lucila Peralta Gavensky, Gonzalo Usaj, Nathan Goldman. Středa Formula for Floquet Systems: Topological Invariants and Quantized Anomalies from Cesàro Summation. Physical Review X, 2025; 15 (3) DOI: 10.1103/b3pw-my97