Hairless skin acts as a heat exchanger between body and environment, and thus greatly contributes to bodytemperature regulation by changing bloodflow to the skin (cutaneous) vascular bed during physiological responsessuch as cold- or warm-defense and fever. Cutaneous bloodflow is also affected by alerting state; we‘go pale withfright’. The rabbit ear pinna and the rat tail have hairless skin, and thus provide animal models for investigating centralpathway regulating bloodflow to cutaneous vascular beds. Cutaneous bloodflow is controlled by the centrallyregulated sympathetic nervous system. Sympathetic premotor neurons in the medullary raphe in the lower brain stemare labeled at early stage after injection of trans-synaptic viral tracer into skin wall of the rat tail. Inactivation of theseneurons abolishes cutaneous vasomotor changes evoked as part of thermoregulatory, febrile or psychologicalresponses, indicating that the medullary raphe is a commonfinal pathway to cutaneous sympathetic outflow, receivingneural inputs from upstream nuclei such as the preoptic area, hypothalamic nuclei and the midbrain. Summarizingevidences from rats and rabbits studies in the last 2 decades, we will review our current understanding of the centralpathways mediating cutaneous vasomotor control .