You’re hurrying along and the front of your shoe catches on a crack in the cement, sending you tumbling to the ground. When you get up, you find that not only is your ego bruised, but you’ve managed to peel away the skin on your elbows and knees. You’ve got yourself a collection of painful scrapes.

You scramble home to prepare the appetizer tray for the guests who will be arriving any minute. You have just one more carrot to slice when, “Ouch!”— your knife slips and slices not the carrot, but your finger. You’ve got a cut.

“A cut is an incision into the skin,” explains Robert Matheson, M.D., a dermatologist in private practice in Portland, Oregon. “It’s a vertical slice into the skin that affects only a limited number of nerves. In contrast, a scrape involves the traumatic removal of skin in a horizontal fashion. It scrapes away the skin’s surface and exposes a larger number of nerves, usually making it more painful than a cut.”

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