Wondering about the uneven dark patches you see here and there on your body?
With approximately 5 million mealnocytes producing melanin, your skin colour varies from darkest brown to lightest pinkish hues. Melanin, being the single most significant substance that determines the skin colour; the higher concentration of melanin substance in your body, the darker your skin appears.
Melanin is usually distributed evenly on your skin, but sometimes it may get deposited unevenly that it causes black, brown or grey patches on your skin. Now this may not cause any serious health issues, but you definitely do not want ugly patches on your smooth skin while you present yourself to the world.
What causes skin darkening?
How these can be treated?
Treatment depends upon certain factors like:
One of the first things to do is prevention or worsening of pigmentation by daily application of sunscreens. Apply sunscreens regularly 20-30 minutes before you step out and don’t forget to reapply every 3-4 hours. Skin lightening treatments will work only if you religiously follow doctor’s advice about sunscreen usage.
The usual treatment modalities include skin lightening creams, chemical peels, micro dermabrasion, masks, laser treatments, camouflage etc depending on the nature of pigmentation. The results vary depending on the cause of pigmentation and usually different modalities need to be combined to achieve favourable outcome.
Birth marks and other naevoid problems are usually managed by lasers like Q switched Nd Yag laser(QSYL) or Diode laser. Treatments are usually spaced 4-6 weeks and need to be done several times. Freckles and lentigenes are treated successfully with QSYL, PDL or FRACTIONAL LASERS. Other causes of pigmentation respond to various peels, masks and medical management.