It is my intense and outmost pleasure to welcome you to this exciting project on lipids and skin in the form of an academic textbook for the very first time. Although the very first baby steps of lipids and skin together took place about 50 years ago in the laboratories of skin lipid pioneer scientists such as professors Downing, Strauss, and Nicolaides, nowadays it seems that together they could rapidly turn into one of the most emerging and intriguing fields of dermatology, lipid science, and metabolism.

Skin is the largest and the most visible—to us and to the others—organ of the human body but in addition to that, the most desired to be understood by the average consumer. Is it perhaps my biased opinion or perception? The jury is out to discover the truth and the validity of this statement. On the other hand, the majority of academic focus has been on cardiovascular health, metabolic diseases, and cancer which pose the most serious threats to our society and pose socio-economic issues far more severe than any disease that stems from the skin (perhaps melanoma being the most aggressive, which is, however, also classified as cancer). Certainly, academic laboratories can secure more funding from NIH, NSF, and private funding institutions to work towards curing devastating diseases responsible for the loss of many human lives, such as the multiple forms of cancer, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and autoimmune diseases, rather than wrinkles, pimples, and age spots for the sake of an example. Perhaps one can agree that the majority of the healthy population that is not concerned daily with issues such as famine or clean water is focusing more on skin conditions than on any other disease. However, we are still far from solving completely all issues with devastating diseases in order to allocate even more resources in quality of life, prevention, and wellness, which certainly gain more ground as the years go by.