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Letter

Nature Materials 4, 293–297 (1 April 2005) | doi:10.1038/nmat1342

Nested self-similar wrinkling patterns in skins

Kirill Efimenko , Mindaugas Rackaitis , Evangelos Manias , Ashkan Vaziri , L. Mahadevan & Jan Genzer

Stiff thin films on soft substrates are both ancient and commonplace in nature; for instance, animal skin comprises a stiff epidermis attached to a soft dermis. Although more recent and rare, artificial skins are increasingly used in a broad range of applications, including flexible electronics, tunable diffraction gratings, force spectroscopy in cells, modern metrology methods, and other devices.