Our next issue to tackle will be those pesky little AGE SPOTS that appear as we get older or as we naughtily stay out in the sun (and a couple that we are just born with). To the layman, we call them brown spots but to the experienced and knowing eye- ‘brown spot’ is not a diagnosis and is not even a very good description! There are a whole host of different types of ‘brown spots’ that can be caused by different issues so I’ll give a little lexicon below. Hyperpigmentation can actually come in the form of brown, bluish, or slate grey. Brown lesions are typically situated more superficially in the epidermis but bluish or grey ones take on this hue only because they are located deeper in the 2nd layer of skin, the dermis, and can be harder to get at.
Also- brown spots reaffirm the importance of mole checking because these types of brown spots can be other nastier things like basal cell carcinomas or malignant melanomas. In other words, don’t try and self-diagnose! Go see your dermatologist if you are particularly mole-y, freckly or just spotty. This is just to enrich your vocabulary.
Becker’s Nevus: Brown patches with excess hair growth. Typically appears in normal males in their teens or their twenties.
Café-au-Lait patches: Pale brown and uniformly coloured with regular borders and are larger than freckles. They can be birth marks or appear later in life.
Freckles: Small brown macules (a small patch) under .5 cm. Sun exposure is the prime cause for freckling and those prone to freckling need to wear sunscreens with long wave UVA protection (along with everyone else!).
Lentigines: Small macules under 1 cm and can look like freckles but are a different type of tissue. Several types including the senile kind (appear in weather beaten skin, sometimes called liver spots) . Upon correct diagnosis of senile lentigines, they can be taken off with liquid nitrogen or selective lasers.
Mongolian Spots: Are spots with a bluish or grey cast to them and appear at birth usually in Asians or darker skinned babies. Can spontaneously disappear by the age of 5 and do not normally continue into adulthood.
Nevus of Ota and Ito: two different types of bluish or grey patches that appear on the face or shoulder areas. Again, Asians and those with dark skin are more commonly affected.
Nevus Spilus : Café-au-lait patches with lentigines speckled inside them. Not related to sun exposure and can appear at any age and can sometimes appear in odd looking configurations.
Seborrheic Keratoses: Benign macules and papules of the skin that are ‘stuck on’ lesions with a well defined border. They can have a slightly raised texture. They can be genetic and come with age. The flat variety are more common on the face and extremities whereas the papular varieties appear more frequently on the torso. Liquid Nitrogen can remove them with a chance of scarring and/ or hyper and hypopigmentation. A new laser system called the Q-switched 532 (a green light laser) has had some good results as well!
Solar or Actinic Keratoses: Rough, scaly or crusty spots due to sun damage. They have a 10% chance of giving rise to a type of skin cancer and should not be left untreated.
These are but a few of the weird things are body can come up with but the moral of the story is to keep an eye on your spots and to develop intervals for checking them with your M.D.
Next up…we are going to investigate some of the trends and hot products across the Atlantic. Also- we are going to be taping some webinars on some tricky how-to’s…like covering melasma, tattoos and bruises. We’ll also be showing you how to work with mineral make-up. If there is anything specifically you would like us to cover, write in and we will see what we can do. Stay tuned.
All the Beauty Best.
Sara DudleyLabels: age spots and birth marks, Brown spots