Given my activities in club during highschool years, I attended a couple of first aid courses, refreshers, paramedic courses, etc as standardized by various volunteer organizations in Germany. At a few occasions, breathing, oxygen processing by the body and such got discussed. And one of the teachers' points usually was that the body gets all its oxygen through the air that we breath into the lung and none through the skin and that it was an urban myth that the skin breaths.

Natural languages are, as we know, horribly vague and inaccurate. So lets get this out of the way. Breathing might refer to oxygen metabolism as well as any process that happens through exposure to air. Examples for the latter might be that wine needs to breath before drinking.¹ In that sense, I regard out of scope for this post whether air exposure for skin is good. For humidity management of the skin it’s certainly nice if evaporation at the skin can happen and for the body’s temperature regulation it’s also necessary to let sweat evaporate. And surely make up commercials say that skin needs to breath, but they also don’t specify what sense of the word, so I assume they mean “our product doesn’t feel like a plastic glove on your face”, and I think that’s a nice feature. But for the remainder of the post I shall use the word breathing only in the context of oxygen metabolism.

First aid trainers would usually refer to the James Bond movie Goldfinger as source for that myth. In that movie, A dead character, covered in gold gets discovered at some point and Bond diagnoses that the gold inhibited the skin’s ability to breath, causing suffocation of the victim. I find that source of the myth very suspicious. (Btw, I had never heard of that myth prior to my first aid classes - doesn’t seem to be such a wide spread misconception).

• Nothing that Bond knows at this point indicates that the gold layer is the cause of death. It looks perfectly plausible that the gold layer was applied post-mortem.
• Bond’s job’s core requirements are lies and deception. There’s no point in trusting him, outside of expositional narrating when he briefs M (or gets briefed by M).
• Bond is not a medical doctor and does not have a medical license.²
• Anything Bond say, he says because the screen writers make him. He can’t say what trained-in-all-skills Bond knows, he says what the screen writers need him to say for whatever reason. And the screen writers have neither medical license nor license to kill.

The trainers would then go on to explain that the heat of full body exposure to molten gold would kill. And this is where things go very wrong in my opinion:

• This is a piece of fiction. We can accept that in-universe Goldfinger’s victim is dead for whatever reason the screen writers made up. They needed her dead, it should involve gold, it should look dramatic on screen, needs to be explained and understood with one sentence. It is futile to discuss why she would’ve actually died if submerged in gold. People die in movies because they get force-choked (Star Wars episode 5) or have unforgivable curses cast on them (Harry Potter) and they survive un-survivable anything (I suspect Cinema Sins have enough examples).

Of cause there’s some trivia associated to that scene: The movie makers were allegedly worried that the gold layer (though I assume it was makeup and not a metal layer) would make her suffocate and left part of the actresses body uncovered. This indicates that the myth pre-dates the movie, how else would it have influenced the making of the movie. But even at this stage we might argue that even if most of the movie makers knew the myth was BS, they could’ve argued and researched to convince those with doubts, or get medical experts to the set (what a waste of time, they could treat patients, train doctors, research diseases, … or consult movie makers on urban myths) … OR the movie makers could just avoid any waste of time and energy and just say “fine let’s leave a stripe uncovered”.

Conclusion: In this post I’ve discovered that

• The fist aid training material in Germany didn’t undergo much scrutiny for its internal consistency when it comes to falsehoods. (I assume the focus was on didactics and medicine).
• The makers of James Bond had access to time travel but not to medical literature

I advise you don’t actually watch Goldfinger. If you’re curious now, I can recommend the corresponding episode of the Kill James Bond! podcast. Also note that other episodes of the podcast point out that the early James Bond movies predate the invention of screenwriting and cinematography. By today’s standards, the movie isn’t that good as a movie. Again, getting medical experts on board doesn’t seem the most urgent issue.

Lastly: When googeling the subject, one finds stories that dancers with full-body makeup have died and their deaths have been attributed to lack of oxygen though the real cause of death was hyperthermia. If those stories are real hasn’t been verified in the research for this blog post, but lets leave it with one advice: Just because I tell you that you won’t suffocate if covering your entire body with airtight whatever doesn’t mean it’s a harmless maneuver.

PS: Generally don’t take medical advice from some random dude’s blog.

PPS: Yes, I am aware that cutaneous breathing is a thing. But even though that first hit on google says they measured a larger than previously assumed amount of oxygen intake of the skin, the values are irrelevant for keeping the rest of the body alive.

PPPS: You might argue that the fact that scuba diving works indicates that the lung alone is sufficient to supply the body with oxygen, but who says the skin can’t take oxygen from water, just like from air (how does drowning work? Neither skin nor lung are alone sufficient). So you enter the discussion of water replacement in wet suits or if the air gets cycled in dry suits. So very cumbersome to debunk.

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