Do you Need Skin Whitening?
Do You Need Skin Whitening?
Skin whitening is more than making your dark skin paler or removing
blemishes. Skin whitening treatments can improve the appearance of your skin:
make it appear cleaner and more translucent, with a more even color. It
involves protecting your skin from wrinkle-inducing UV rays, and minimizing or
eliminating wrinkles and other signs of aging. It’s no wonder that women with
pale skin in Asian culture are generally thought to look younger; many of them
do.
Asian women are often more interested in the youthening
effects of skin whitening. Younger-looking skin makes one more confident and
attractive, and can change not only your opinion about yourself but also
others’ opinions about you.
If your skin tone is dull, yellowish, uneven, darker than you like, or
has lost clarity and translucence, you might consider skin whitening care to
improve your appearance. Some other conditions include:
- Uneven, dark skin
- Multi-colored or mottled complexion
- Dry, rough, flaky skin
- Stretched-feeling skin, or skin that
seems loose
- Makeup slides off or does not blend
- Skin problems
- Dull-looking skin
- Freckles more prominent around eyes and
cheekbones
Why Whiter Skin?
Just like anything in the beauty industry, the primary mover is that men
like light skin, and women also find it more attractive. Men find whiter skin
more attractive than dark skin all over East Asia. Sixty-nine percent of
Indonesian men and nearly as many women preferred lighter skin in the opposite
sex. Seventy-four percent of Malaysian males agreed.
Light skin being associated with beauty is deeply rooted in Asian
perception and culture. There’s an old Chinese saying, “One white makes up for
three bad things,” meaning that light skin can cover many other flaws. Asian
women avoid freckles and other skin “flaws” that mar perfectly smooth skin.
They’re also looking to rid their skin of yellow tones, aiming to a perfect
shade of ivory.
You can see this preference reflected in the skin-whitening industry;
all the products available today promise to eliminate skin pigment and bleach
skin, lighten skin tone, and fade and blend away dark spots – freckles
and other skin color differentiations. There’s even a deodorant roll-on that
promises to whiten the armpits.
Pigmentation Problems
Some people seek out skin lightening because of pigmentation problems:
patchiness, masks around the eyes, dark circles, scarring, or other uneven
pigmentation. Skin lightening products can often correct these problems, even
if you don’t want your skin to be lighter overall.
Incorrect pigmentation, whether patches of
too much or too little, are often caused by malfunctioning endocrine glands and
liver. Other factors
like excessive exposure to sunlight, bad cosmetics choices, some oral medications,
iron deficiency, calcium deficiency, or overuse or underuse of vitamin A, E
& B Complex can cause pigmentation problems.
Facial pigment problems most often show up on the nose, forehead, and
cheeks.
Hyperpigmentation
Age spots, liver spots, sun spots, and large freckles can be caused by
everything from birth-control pills to the UV rays of the sun or tanning
parlor. Regardless of cause, they are hard to get rid of.
The first step is in identifying what they are. Port wine spots, present
from birth in most people who have them, are caused by a collection of
microscopic blood vessels too close to the skin’s surface. There are many other
forms of skin spots that are not hyperpigmentation
and will not go away with treatments for hyperpigmentation.
For most women aged 25 to 38, though, melasma
is the cause of hyperpigmentation. It’s the skin’s
response to fluctuating hormonal levels from pregnancy or birth control pills
and is made worse by exposure to the sun. It’s most common among women with
ethnic skin tones – women who tan easily and have some tint to their
skin. When treating melasma, you can’t be
overaggressive; the skin’s natural response, especially in darker-complected women, is to make more pigment.
Eliminating Pigmented Spots
The medical term for the two different types of
pigmented spots you may find on your body are lentigines
(age spots) and ephelides (freckles). Depending on
your pigmentation, they may be tan, brown, or black spots, and appear over time
on areas of your
skin that are exposed to the sun. Most commonly, you’ll find these spots on the
backs of your hands, on your face, and on your legs. If you tan extensively and
are prone to this type of pigmentation, you’ll also find them over the
shoulders, back, chest, and other areas of the skin.
Lentigines are collections of melanin which have
accumulated in one area of your epidermis, or top layer of skin. They appear
later in life and may occur in any skin type, from the lightest to the darkest.
Ephelides are like lentigines
in how they’re formed, but tend to appear in lighter skin types who sunburn
easily.
Both these types of spots occur rarely in areas of the body that aren’t
exposed to the sun. If you avoid the sun and use a good sunscreen, you can
minimize both lentigines and ephelides.
To get rid of pigmented spots, a variety of medical treatments may be
used. The key is to eliminate the superficial area of skin on which they
appear.
