Skin Turgor Test: How to See If You’re Drinking Enough

The skin turgor test helps you to find out quickly whether you are drinking enough. In particular, young and old people occasionally tend not to drink enough. This can have fatal consequences. With the skin turgor test you have an extraordinarily simple control option.

Skin turgor test – see at a glance if you’re drinking enough

Drinking is essential for us and with the skin turgor test you can easily test at any time whether you have consumed enough liquid. After all, the proportion of water in our body ranges between 50 and 80 percent. How high the body’s water content ultimately is depends, among other things, on age. In newborns, the water content is even over 90 percent.

• Water ensures that our organs work correctly and by the way: A balanced fluid balance also has a significant influence on brain performance. That alone should be an incentive to drink enough water.
• The skin is not only our largest organ, it is also a good indicator of our well-being. Dry and sagging skin not only makes us look old, it can also be a sign that we are not drinking properly.
• Dermatologists refer to skin tension as skin turgor: the tension of the skin in turn depends on the fluid content of the cells. With the skin turgor test, you can check how tight your skin is.

Skin turgor test – how to do it quickly

Performing the skin turgor test is absolutely simple and can be done within seconds:

• Take some skin from the back of your hand between your fingers and gently pull the skin up.
• Then pinch the skin firmly between your index finger and thumb for a few seconds.
• After letting go of the fold of skin, the amount of time it takes for the skin to smooth out is critical. If your fluid balance is balanced, your skin will immediately bounce back.
• If, on the other hand, you see a clear dent on your hand for a long time after letting go of the skin, you should immediately reach for the water bottle. In this case, it makes sense to carry out the skin turgor test more frequently until your skin springs back again at lightning speed.

The optimal amount to drink

As a general rule, you should drink between two and three liters of water a day. Depending on your personal requirements, it can also be a little more.

• If you do sports or sweat a lot, it can definitely be more. However, you should not overdo it because you can also drink too much water.
• While it’s extremely rare, water intoxication can actually occur if you put too much water in your body in a short amount of time. People have died from what is known as hyponatremia.