One picture holds this whole word: something soft being pulled tight and drawn . Put it on skin and the surface tightens and the oil is carried off; put it on a small cut and the flesh closes; take it into your mouth and your cheeks feel dry and shrunken; put it into a sentence and the sentence loses every soft edge it had. The pull is always the same. What changes is only what is being pulled in — skin, tissue, the inside of the mouth, or the padding around what someone says.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary gives astringent from Latin adstringere 'to bind fast', made of ad- 'toward' and stringere 'bind, pull tight', and points to stringent from the same root. The modern picture sits right on top of that: everything astringent pulls something in toward itself.
依 Wiktionary，astringent 來自拉丁文 adstringere（綁緊），由 ad-（朝向）加 stringere（拉緊、綁住）組成，同一個字根也長出 stringent（嚴格的）。現代的畫面正好疊在字根上：凡是 astringent 的東西，都在把某樣東西往自己這邊收緊。
Wiktionary 'astringent' etymology, supplied in packet (kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:866794924)
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