What is Hyperpigmentation?

Video Transcript

Hi. My name is Mary Thinnes and I'm a skin care expert. The topic I'm going to discuss right now is hyper pigmentation. As I mentioned before, lightening gels are what help fix that condition, but I want to go and explain to you what hyper pigmentation is and how it's caused. Hyper pigmentation is the darkening of an area of skin an the reason why that skin is darkened is our skin contains melano sites [ph]. And melano sites are in charge of your skin's color. With repeated exposure to the sun, your melano sites rush to the surface of the skin to protect the skin. So, that's why we get tanned or that's why people get darker. And in certain areas, like I showed you before on my arm there's a spot of hyper pigmentation. What happens is if one area is repeatedly exposed to the sun and repeatedly damaged in that same area, the melano sites rush to that certain area faster to protect it and so then your brown spots occur. So, that's how you get the hyper pigmentation. And other causes of hyper pigmentation is you can see on here are - can be from inflammation to the skin caused from acne. You know, after people have abstracted an acne legion on their face a lot of the times they'll see that red spot there afterwards and that's a form of hyper pigmentation as well. I mentioned before freckles are a type of hyper pigmentation. Skin tones that are more prevalent to getting hyper pigmentation. That doesn't mean that other skin types can't get it, but usually it's dark, Asian, East Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and African American that are more prone to the pigmentation disorders. So, just keep that in mind. I will go over how to determine your own skin type and color on the Fix Patrick Scale [ph] and I'll go over that on a later time. But that is what hyper pigmentation is.

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