The skin or epidermis of a plant is its outward face to the World and buffers it from changes in temperature and humidity; protects it against threats such as pests and pathogens; helps it extract nutrients from the air and soil and even assists it to disperse its seeds into new and hopefully more favourable places to grow. Many plants have evolved specialized epidermal cells (Figure 1) for some of these functions and scientists are starting to unravel at a detailed molecular level the processes that allow the cells in the plant's skin to develop these specialized roles relative to the adjacent cells that are just the bricks and mortar of the plant (Larkin et al., 2003). Cotton is no different and has developed all sorts of specialized hairs that cover the plants leaves, stems, petioles, petals and roots, but it is the very long hairs on the seeds that first attracted man's interest in cotton and these have driven the domestication and widespread adoption of cotton as a premier agricultural crop for fibre production for textiles.