>>57911Well, uh, since you asked...
It's actually a combination of a couple things:
circulation and the lymphatic system. The lymphatic vessels of the body (lymphangions) don't have a pump - the heart - like the circulatory system does. Instead, lymph fluid is pushed through these vessels through a vaccum and one-way valve system that is generally activated by stretch of the skin, alongside movement of our muscles, joints and fascia.
As you can imagine, being unable to move very well - or at all - can be extremely challenging to our ability to circulate lymphatic fluid. This fluid tends to then build up and then leak outside of their vessels into the space around the vessels under the skin, called the extracellular space. The resulting swelling of the limbs is the phenomenon you may know as lymphedema or lipidema.
Now, lymph fluid is very protein-dense - protein are very large compared to other molecules, so they don't tend to move back into intercellular space well. This causes this swelling to be difficult to manage without continuous medical/lymph-therapist management. Therefore, the fluid tends to build up to the point where circulation to those areas ends up quite compromised. There's way too little space for capillary blood to circulate very well due to all that lymph fluid hanging out in that extracellular space.
The firming and changes of texture of the skin (including those pores) due to a lack of circulation is called "scleroderma", where the skin becomes yellowed and firmer. Finally, the discoloration of the skin is a leaking of capillary blood into extracellular space right under the skin, as there is too much pressure against the capillaries among all of that lymph fluid to circulate efficiently, which causes some of that blood to get squeezed out of the capillaries into the surrounding space. That is why the skin tends too look like a combination of yellow, purple and yellow in patches.
I hope this helps!
