Snake Skin (ヘビ皮, Hebi Kawa) is the scaled skin associated with various species of snakes.
Made almost entirely of scales, these scales protect the body of the snake, aid it in locomotion, allow moisture to be retained within, can alter the skin's surface characteristics such as roughness to aid in camouflage, and in some cases even aid in prey capture.
The moulting of the skin occurs regularly (occurring around once a month to a few times a year depending on the snake's age, the internal processes of separating the old skin from the new lasting around a week before the actual shedding happens) to replace old or worn out scales, dispose of parasites and is also part of a snake's growth process (hence why they shed more often when young) as the individual scales can only grow a certain amount before needing to be replaced with new ones.
Snakeskin leather is regarded as an exotic product alongside crocodile, lizard, ostrich, emu, and camel skin. It is used to make clothing such as vests, belts, boots or shoes or fashion accessories such as handbags and is used to cover the sound board of some string musical instruments, such as the Banhu, Sanxian or the Sanshin.
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- A shed skin is substantially longer than the snake that shed it, as the shed skin also consists of the stretchy skin between each scale (normally not visible), effectively increasing its length.
- While a snake is in the process of preparing to shed its skin, the eye will become milky for up to a few days as fluid helps separate the old scale over the eye from the new one under that scale. This impairs the vision of the snake and as a result most snakes will become more aggressive because the snake feels more vulnerable due to its heavily obscured eyesight. This also often makes them lose their appetites until the shedding is complete.
- As seen in Chapter 7, shedding also causes Lamia to lose their appetites, but their eyes don't become milky and their vision is not impaired for a few days. This is probably because Lamia shed their old scale only on their tails and not on their faces, thereby obviating the need for fluid to be produced to help them replace the old scale over their eyes from the new under that scale.
- The arrangement of scale in a snake skin can be used to identify the snake's species.
- Interestingly, a snake sheds its skin in one piece in a similar way to how one would take off a sock. However, Miia (a Lamia) is demonstrated as shedding her skin in pieces, similar to how a human or lizard would molt (although it is noted that she was having a difficult molt due to stress, which can result in similar patchy sheds in real snakes).
- A common cause for shedding problems is dry air. Raising the humidity and adding a box partially filled with damp items such as dampened paper towels, moss, or other soft substrate material may help the snake dampen the skin enough to safely shed.
- The vast majority of all Lamias find shedding their skin far more embarrassing than flat out nudity, as while Miia was more than willing to expose herself to Kimihito, she was far more flustered when he caught her shedding.