Hyperlinear Hands and the Big Vampire Lady
Lady Dimitrescu of Resident Evil VIllage.
You might be seeing the above image and wondering, “What am I looking at here?” Or, maybe, “Who am I looking at here?” Well, apparently the individual in this image is named Lady Dimitrescu and she is the main antagonist of the next sequel in the long-running Resident Evil series of video games, Resident Evil VIllage. People seem to think she’s a vampire witch of some sort, certainly a creepy and supernatural being with a very compelling and enigmatic design.
She’s also very big.
I mean, like, tall. Very tall. And voluptuous. Very voluptuous.
Twitter is full of people who apparently want this very tall and very voluptuous vampire lady to step on them. Case in point:
Over 25,000 people liked a tweet from Alanah Pearce with a picture of the Big Vampire Lady that just said “step on me”
There are some solid theories that perhaps Lady Dimitrescu is based on Hachishakusama, a Japanese “urban legend” about a curvy eight foot tall demon woman.
Ash Parrish at Kotaku even went through painstaking effort to estimate Big Vampire Lady’s actual height, which adds some tangential support to this theory:
With all those assumptions in place, here’s what I’ve come up with. The measurements for the door put it at 86 inches tall, solving your height from foot to shoulder. Now, to determine your full height, I Googled the average length of a head which is eight to nine inches. I added an extra inch because nothing about you, you big-ass, scary-ass BAMF, is average, making the height of your head from shoulder to crown 10 inches. Add that to the 86 inches and you’re 96 inches tall—or eight feet.
But as the high resolution images of Lady Dimitrescu started making the rounds online, people started to notice other features beyond her incredible height and ample bosom. Most notable, perhaps, was the texture of her skin:
The texture of Big Vampire Lady’s skin has become a point of conversation, as well as seen in this tweet.
People have speculated that her skin might be like this because she’s undead, or perhaps she’s actually a werewolf and that’s fur. Others have joked that she just needs some better moisturizing routines (though let’s be real—with a face like that and given she seems to be quite a bit older than one might think, she seems to know how to care for her skin).
But when I saw it, my first thought was:
“Oh, her skin looks like mine.”
Hyperlinear Hands
One of my hyperlinear hands.
Before I get into what I mean by this, I wanted to share a photo of my palm.
First off, if you’re below the age of 65, I want you to look at your right hand and compare it to mine. Whose hand has more lines? Do you have those striations on your fingers? Do you have the huge scrabble of lines on your palm next to your thumb? Do you have criss-crosses of lines along your palm, even crossing the midline? Any wrinkles?
These are the things that classify my palm as a hyperlinear palm.
Once, I posted a photo of my palm in the sun on Twitter and a dermatologist acquaintence of mine immediately commented, “A hyperlinear hand?” That’s how obvious it is to a professional.
Another time, I went to have a palm reading done by a local psychic because even though I don’t believe in any of that stuff, my family from the old country used to do it and I thought it would be fun. The psychic looked at my palm, looked at me, looked at my palm, looked at me, and said, “I can’t read this.”
That’s how obvious it is to a professional.
So what are hyperlinear hands? If you were to search the literature, you’d find dermatologists describing hyperlinear hands for decades and establishing a direct link between them and atopic dermatitis. And then, further, they link them to a rare genetic disorder called ichthyosis vulgaris. (The main feature of ichthyosis is patches of silvery dead skin on the surface of the body—itchy, uncomfortable, cracking, prone to infection, et cetera.) Here’s an abstract from an article in the Archives of Dermatology from 1981 by Uehara and Hayashi describing this connection:
Abstract from Arch Dermatol. 1981;117(8):490-491. doi:10.1001/archderm.1981.01650080044026
In the subsequent years since the connection between hyperlinear palms, atopic dermatitis, and ichthyosis were identified, we’ve had a revolution in the field of genetics and human genetics in particular. Connections like those shown here between a clinical feature like hyperlinear hands, a complex disorder like atopic dermatitis, and a genetic disorder like ichthyosis strongly suggest a genetic link.
We know the gene that causes ichthyosis. It’s the FLG gene, which codes for a protein called filaggrin.
The True Villain: Filaggrin
Filaggrin is a key component of maintaining a normal, healthy epidermal layer, basically. It supports your skin and the other epidermal surfaces of your body. It is largely responsible for supporting the skin barrier and preventing allergens from crossing the barrier and causing problems.
Over the years, research into filaggrin deficiency and people carrying mutated forms of the FLG gene have tied it to eczema, ichthyosis vulgaris, and other forms of severe dry skin. But it’s also now recognized as related to asthma susceptibility and exacerbation, particularly when exposed to allergens, and allergic rhinitis (colloquially referred to as “allergies” or “hay fever”).
As it turns out, in addition to having hyperlinear hands, I also have… asthma, allergies, eczema, and a mild form of ichthyosis. Not only do my hands have a lot of lines, they also have patches of scaly dead skin and cracks (in fact, you can see one in the middle of my palm in that image). The soles of my feet as well have these patches and bigger cracks which I have to use steroids and creams to treat. I’ve had ichthyosis patches variously on my body over the years, but am fortunate to have a mild case of it.
As a human geneticist myself, I of course have done what every human geneticist dreams of doing: I sequenced myself. And what did I find? Sure enough, I’m carrying one copy of the common variant of FLG known to be tied to eczema (R501X). But I’ve also got a second rare mutation in the gene which is of unknown significance. It’s impossible for me to know if this is why I have a ichthyosis that goes beyond the severe eczema associated with R501X without more study, but it could be.
As a complete aside, I found this out about myself around a decade ago after years of questioning whether I had asthma and thinking I just had very dry skin. Once I started putting everything together, as I became aware of FLG and was earning my PhD in human genetics, I started to meet other people with the same condition. I remember one friend, a woman from Japan, who had patches of ichthyosis scales and asthma and allergies and all the other serious symptoms of the disorder who just thought she had eczema and was suffering (not to get too detailed, but this condition comes with the side effect of being very itchy a lot). I talked with her about it and we commiserated over sharing the same condition and she ended up seeing a dermatologist and getting the correct steroids for treating the patches, at least.
One thing I noted about her and, frankly, that other people often make comment about me is that our faces look surprisingly youthful. Is this a universal feature of people with filaggrin deficiency? Honestly… I have no idea. The literature doesn’t seem to go into this (though… it seems measurable).
Hello, this is my face, aren’t I cute?
I shared on Twitter the other day that I just turned 39 years old. A friend of mine commented that he couldn’t believe it, he thought I was much younger. He asked me my secret. And here it is. It’s not makeup. It’s not a special skincare routine.
It’s that my skin is literally fundamentally different. Maybe. I don’t actually know if that’s why. This is just a blog, not a thoroughly researched scientific paper! But… maybe it’s relevant? After all, there’s literature examining the role of filaggrin in the development of atopic dermatitis in children that seems to suggest a relationship between the suppleness of newborn infant cheeks and the fact that the “skin barrier is inadequately matured.” The hypothesis seems to be that this is why atopic dermatitis and primary sensitization to food allergens may be tied to this “inadequate maturity” of the cheek skin, which is related to the low concentration of “natural moisturizing factors (NMFs)” in the cheek skin of young children. One of the key components of NMF? The breakdown products of filaggrin. (I pulled all this from an editorial and associated article from the British Journal of Dermatology, 2018. Full citation of article: McAleer et al., Br J Dermatol 2018; 179:431-441.)
Author’s note: Just to be abundantly clear, I’m a human geneticist, not a dermatologist, so while I know a lot about the genetics, I’m not an expert on the biological structure of human skin… but I do know my way around scientific articles and journals. That said, the above is speculation, not scientific fact!
But… maybe that’s why, while I have the hands of a 70 year old man, I have the face of someone 15 years younger than me? Or maybe it’s all that EVOO I put on everything, who knows? (Author’s note: I’m required by law as a second generation Greek American whose family is from Kalamata, Greece to put olive oil on everything.)
It’s amazing how, once we become aware of these types of conditions, we can see evidence of them start popping up all over the place and, potentially, show up in our fiction as well. Did the creators of Lady Dimitrescu use filaggrin-deficient ichthyosis as a source of inspiration? Perhaps, or perhaps it is merely the symptoms that they were aware of that were a bit of an inspiration. The concept of a person with a supple face but skin covered in lines and scales isn’t unusual—we see it all the time in folks with atopic dermatitis.
It makes me think back to my first post on this blog about the lazy design aesthetic of misrepresenting genetic conditions. In that case, real genetic conditions were being represented as monstrous. Here, again, we have an example where the consequences of real genetic conditions are represented on a monster. I guess it’s just such a simple place to draw inspiration from sometimes. To me, the difference here may be the power that is represented by this person with these features. This character isn’t just a throwaway enemy but appears to be the main antagonist and, frankly, star of this game. How it comes across to those of us who have the conditions in question will vary, but it doesn’t hurt that Lady Dimitrescu is inarguably enigmatic, beautiful, and attractive.
Vampire and werewolf myths and legends can be traced back directly to the real infectious disease rabies. People infected with rabies experience symptoms like rabid behavior, hydrophobia (fear of water), seizures, and a disinterest in food. They eventually experience lockjaw and it can be fatal. A terrible disease whose features happen to map onto our legendary definitions of vampires and werewolves quite precisely. Is it any surprise, therefore, that modern representations of vampires, werewolves, zombies, and other “disease-adjacent” monsters might draw inspiration from other infections (the cordyceps-inspired zombies of The Last of Us, for example) and genetic disorders (the bad representations of cleft lip and other physical disabilities in Rage 2, for example)? I suppose not. I just hope that it’s done in a dignified way. I’d hope that we’d see as many “heroes” with these types of features as we do “monsters”.
Because as much as “ichthyosis” sounds like a disease that might turn someone into a fish or something like that, those of us that have it (like myself) are human beings suffering a pretty severe condition. We deserve compassion and dignity.
All that said, I don’t mind that much if a ridiculously tall, very well endowed vampire lady that everyone seems to have a crush on happens to have the same skin condition I do. That would be kind of cool, actually. I just hope when she inevitably turns into a squid monster or whatever happens in this game, it isn’t cheaply using real features of genetic disorders to make her appear monstrous and deformed.
