“The Truth About Melasma” is an educational skincare book that unveils the true nature of melasma. It combines facts about melasma backed up by science with a holistic treatment approach. Find out how a damaged environment and a stressed society contribute to this skin condition. Become empowered to heal yourself. Regain balance within your body, create harmony in your environment and fall in love with yourself while healing your skin.
“The Truth About Melasma” is an educational skincare book that unveils the true nature of melasma. It combines facts about melasma backed up by science with a holistic treatment approach. Find out how a damaged environment and a stressed society contribute to this skin condition. Become empowered to heal yourself. Regain balance within your body, create harmony in your environment and fall in love with yourself while healing your skin.
Melasma is a form of hyperpigmentation that typically displays on the face and is primarily associated with pregnancy and sun exposure. Early records documented melasma only in pregnant women, which is why it is also labelled as a “mask of pregnancy”. The main contributing factor for melasma during pregnancy is an increased level of the female sex hormone estrogen and placental hormones. Women on “the pill” (birth control contraception) often develop melasma, which reinforces the belief that estrogen is to blame. However, melasma also affects women who have no history of pregnancy or taking the pill; it affects men [1] and the transgender population [3].
The sun, often blamed and therefore shunned, is the other main factor believed to cause melasma. This is not an entirely wrong assumption since the sun is known to form the most common type of hyperpigmentation, the tan. But how is it possible that more and more people develop melasma while humans spend more time indoors than we have over the last hundred years? The clients I have consulted have rigorously used sunscreen daily out of fear of forming more pigmentation. The use of sunscreen had neither prevented brown patches nor led to fading. This raises the question: What factors other than oral contraceptives, pregnancy or sun exposure drive this skin condition?
Elevated estrogen levels can indeed cause hyperpigmentation, but estrogen can rise by several external factors. Some of these factors are chemicals that hide in cosmetic products. Ironically, despite the belief that sunscreen is essential for people with melasma, some UV filters act as hormone disruptors resulting in increased estrogen levels. Oxybenzone, for example, is a widely used chemical UV filter and is known to mimic estrogen.
Additionally, many sunscreens do not have equivalent UVA and UVB filters in their formula. The main concern of sunscreen developers and formulators is to prevent sunburn. Sunburn is caused by UVB light. Because the main goal is to prevent sunburn, manufacturers often focus on UVB protection. Hence the SPF claim (15, 20, 30, 50+) on the bottles often only stands for the UVB filter, not the UVA filter [4]. A broad-spectrum sunscreen will have filters for both types of UV, but the UVA filter might be lower. That means the two types of rays are split into different degrees of protection and penetration, which can aggravate pigmentation.
The pattern of melasma is significant, as it appears symmetrically and favours the cheeks, forehead, nose and upper lip area. People with naturally darker skin types are more prone to develop melasma. Regarding the skin cells, it is typical that the melanocytes are bigger and contain more melanin than usual, while their actual number is not increased. Furthermore, the hyperpigmented areas in melasma are not only found in the epidermal layer, where brown pigment should be but also underneath, the dermal layer (dermis). The fact that lesions are found in the dermis is likely a reason why melasma is harder to treat. Tattoos, for example, are purposely placed in the dermis to make them last forever.
Wood’s lamps are widely used in skin therapy studios as skin diagnosis tools. When examining the skin, this lamp is a helpful tool to find out if pigmentation is present in the dermis. If the melasma lesions, or part of them, are not visible under the wood’s lamp, we have dermal pigmentation. The reason is simply that the light emitted by the wood’s lamp cannot reach into the deeper dermal layers. You only see what is in the epidermis.
Science has come a long way in recent years when it comes to the treatment of illness and disease but, needless to say, it still has a long way to go yet, not least with conditions that disproportionately affected women and girls. As someone who has been diagnosed with endometriosis, I very much know the feeling of being lost in the Wild West of that prescriptive medicine can offer.
Janett Juwien, a trained cosmetic scientist, aesthetician and owner of both a bachelor of science and multiple renowned beauty salons in Germany and Australia has turned her years of expertise into writing in her new self-help guide, The Truth About Melasma. Melasma is a skin condition that affects skin pigmentation, usually on the face and, in the majority of cases, women (although it is worth noting about 20% of those with the condition are male). In this handy guide that comes in at just under 200 pages, Juwien analyses both the causes of the condition and the treatments that can help alleviate symptoms. This includes not only medicated options but also lifestyle changes and vitamin supplements that are cheap and readily accessible.
There is a lot to like with this book. It is highly visual, with colour illustrations and tables to bring to life some of the dryer facts and figures. Coming from a very much non-scientific background I have to take the book's guidance on face value, however every single assertion made in The Truth About Melasma is fully supported with research footnotes that provide the ability to conduct independent research. That, coupled with the author's own scientific knowledge and experience provides a needed dose of reassurance to any reader.
This guide feels like all the best parts of an extended Google search on Melasma, rolled into one handy to use guide. That considered, The Truth About Melasma is something I would recommend to anyone, male and female, who suffers with this skin complaint. With some of the guidance in this book, you cannot go far wrong.
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