Management of a patient with hyperpigmentation: general recommendations

Diagnosis of hyperpigmentation is a mandatory stage of the skin lightening program

2024-01-14

Is it always advisable to change skin pigmentation? How to be sure that the use of bleaching agents will be justified and safe? What factors affect the outcome of certain procedures and what unwanted side effects, complications and long-term consequences can be expected? All this will be discussed in the article.

The color of our skin is influenced by many factors - from the number and location of blood vessels, the number and distribution of pigments to the thickness of the epidermis and the condition of the stratum corneum. The most important skin pigments are hemoglobin, carotenoids and melanins. As a rule, patients with melanin dyschromias, which are a serious cosmetic defect, turn to specialists in aesthetic medicine.

Skin pigmentation is divided into constitutional (fixed genetically and independent of external influences) and facultative (physiological and pathological hyperpigmentation). All humanity is divided into populations: Negroid, Mongoloid, Caucasian races. The most noticeable feature that shows the differences between them is the pigmentation of the skin. For the first time, the scale of skin phototypes, taking into account racial characteristics, was proposed by Fitzpatrick and later modified by D. Fulton.

There is no generally accepted classification of pigmentation disorders. Different problems are most often described by the terms "dyschromia" and "melanoderma".

Full version of the access article in Ukrainian