Are you facing skin discoloration or seeking its details? Well, this skin issue is considered a normal issue nowadays. However, if temporary sources don’t cause it, one can’t consider it common. Instead, most of the time, this skin problem is caused by serious health issues. Hence, it’s highly important for someone facing this issue to address it and its treatment by consulting a doctor.
But before you do that, how do you know whether your skin darkening/discoloration is caused by an intense issue or something as casual as the sun’s UV rays? Do you have any idea? Well, we’ve got you covered with complete guidelines on determining the causes and treatments of this issue – helping you get rid of it easily at the right time.
So let’s go ahead and discover everything you need to know about skin darkening below.
How Does Your Skin Darken?
The major cause of skin darkening is the production of too much melanin in our body. Plenty of things can cause excessive growth of melanin, which makes your skin dark. Commonly, pregnancy, sun exposure, and Addison’s disease can be reasons that may cause skin darkening.
Moreover, for those that have a lighter skin color, it can be considered that their body produces lesser melanin naturally. Yet, if you talk about the light color patches on your skin, which can also result from less melanin production due to different health-related issues. Commonly, Vitiligo is the condition where your skin faces light patches at odd times. But if it’s a genetic condition, it is termed as Albinism.
However, this isn’t all to the causes of light and dark-colored skin on your face or body. There’s a lot more to that. So let’s go ahead and discover below the causes and treatments in detail.
Causes of Skin discoloration:
There are multiple causes of darkened skin. But if an individual isn’t aware of the common and possible causes, it’s hard for them to diagnose and treat this issue on time. Hence, it’s highly important to understand the causes of dark skin to better understand how common or serious the issue is.
To help you with that, we’ve discussed below all the causes in detail:
Genetic Causes:
Mostly, the reasons for facing dark or light skin patches can be due to some genetic issues. Now, most of the diseases (common or serious ones) are caused due to genetic reasons, making it harder to even self-diagnose. However, there are specific genetic causes that you can consider if you are facing such skin problems. This mainly includes causes that are related to our genes like:
- Acanthosis nigricans
- Incontinenta pigmenti
- Neurofibromatosis (this genital disease causes light or dark patches on your skin from your birth.
- Xeroderma pigmentosum (this is a genetic disorder that is caused by our DNA repair)
Hormonal Causes:
Normally, our hormones keep on changing from time to time. The reasons for that can vary hugely on our lifestyle, body changes, and diet. Mostly, women go through plenty of body changes, so they are more likely to ace hormonal changes. Now in such cases, specific hormonal changes also result in causing a darkened skin. This includes changes like:
- Facing Addison’s disease (it is known as the reduced production of hormones through the adrenal glands).
- Having the Cushing disease (caused by the excessive circulating levels faced by the corticosteroids.
- Hyperthyroidism (caused by the overactive thyroids in our body)
- Facing various oral contraceptives
- Pregnancy
Environmental Causes:
Similar to hormonal changes, there are plenty of changes that our body faces due to environmental changes. From moving to areas that are highly polluted to occasionally visiting places with excessive dirt or dust, any kind of environmental change can affect our body. But in the case of skin darkening, it’s important to analyze the common environmental changes that cause skin darkening. These changes include:
- Facing excessive UV rays of the sun during peak times
- Facing direct contact with Toxic chemicals or dirt/pollution on our skin
Other Things that Cause Dark Skin:
Now that we’ve discovered some highlighted causes of skin darkening, you might consider which one is the cause of your condition, right? But before that, let’s discover some more causes that also result in skin darkening (as anything can affect our skin negatively, mainly in darkening it). So this way, you can better analyze why you’re facing this. Some such additional causes include:
- Due to diabetic dermopathy (which causes light brown and scaly patches on our skin due to the changes that our blood vessels face regarding diabetes)
- Facing freckles
- Being diagnosed with hemochromatosis
- Facing Tinea versicolor (in other terms, known as a fungal condition of the skin).
Extremely Serious Causes:
Since most of the previously mentioned causes of skin discoloration are found as a common issue faced by many today. However, that’s not all to it! Instead, most of the time, we can also face dark skin or light skin patches when our body is facing serious issues like:
- Addison’s disease (which is the reduced production of hormones that is faced by our adrenal glands)
- Hemochromatosis (which is caused by the excessive presence of iron in our body)
Prevention and Treatment:
Once you have managed to determine the causes of skin discoloration, you might want to get it treated, right? Besides, who would like to manage with an odd-looking skin with different colored patches (even if it is harmless? Certainly, no one! So don’t panic if you’ve started facing skin darkening or discoloration, or if you are afraid of facing this situation – as there are ways you can get rid of your fears easily. From reliable preventions to effective medical treatments and natural remedies, there’s a lot that can help you handle this situation. So let’s go ahead and discover them below:
Preventions:
Some prevention that can stop or limit skin discoloration includes:
- Avoiding the excessive exposure of the sun during its peak time. For this, even if you can’t stay at home all the time, it’s better and effective to use a sunscreen that has an SPF