Abstract Pollen retention on clothes, footwear, hair and body has been used to link people to localities with distinctive vegetation, or soils containing distinctive palynomorphs. Little attention has been given to human skin as a possible medium for carrying a forensically important pollen load and whether this might survive attempts to remove it. We report here the results of experiments testing the retention of pollen of 10 flowering plant species on the human skin through repeated cycles of washing and drying hands, using the WHO protocol to standardize hand-washing and drying. Between 0.36% and 2.74% (mean 0.93%) of the initial pollen load was retained through a single hand-wash. Trace amounts of some species survived multiple hand-wash cycles. It is concluded that forensic analyses can be made of the pollen load of those parts of the skin that may have been in contact with palynologically distinctive vegetation, even in cases where the person involved has washed, or been washed. These observations may also be of relevance in cases where human skin became contaminated with other microscopic particulates.

中文翻译：

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你的手干净吗？洗后花粉留在手上

摘要 衣服、鞋类、头发和身体上的花粉滞留已被用于将人们与具有独特植被的地区或含有独特孢粉型的土壤联系起来。很少有人关注人体皮肤作为携带法医上重要的花粉负荷的可能媒介以及它是否可以在去除它的尝试中幸存下来。我们在此报告了通过反复洗手和干燥手循环测试 10 种开花植物花粉在人体皮肤上的保留的实验结果，使用 WHO 协议来标准化洗手和干燥。通过单次洗手，保留了 0.36% 至 2.74%（平均 0.93%）的初始花粉量。微量的一些物种在多次洗手循环中幸存下来。得出的结论是，即使在所涉及的人已经洗过或被洗过的情况下，也可以对可能与孢粉学独特植被接触的那些皮肤部分的花粉负荷进行法医分析。在人类皮肤被其他微观颗粒污染的情况下，这些观察结果也可能具有相关性。