Water diffusion within the stratum corneum

We report the development of a new technique for measuring the water distribution and water diffusion within the top ten microns of human skin. It is remote sensing and can be applied non-destructively to arbitrary condensed samples. It achieves a high specificity for water by exploiting optical absorption peaks in the middle infrared spectral region. We present examples of in-vitro and in-vivo measurements of surface hydration and water concentration gradient in human stratum corneum.