The natural or abnormal shedding or peeling of skin, scales, or other tissue in flakes or layers.
From desquamate with the suffix -tion (state or process of), from Latin squama (scale). This is a standard medical term used in dermatology and pathology.
Desquamation happens constantly on healthy skin—you shed thousands of dead skin cells daily—but we only use this term when something goes visibly wrong, reminding us that medicine often hijacks ordinary biological vocabulary for abnormalities.
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