How To Care For Darker Skin

It’s a point of some contention as to whether darker skin really requires a whole separate skincare regime from lighter skin, but there is one thing the experts agree on: darker skin is more prone to scarring and pigmentation. Thankfully, it’s relatively easy to avoid!

How Melanin Affects Your Skin

Before we go into exactly why dark skin is prone to pigmentation, we have to explain some of the science behind it all first. Essentially, darker skin tones are home to higher levels of melanin. Melanin is found all throughout your body including in your hair, pupils and brain, but we’re not so hot on brain surgery so for now we’re just going to focus on the role it plays in skincare. Melanin are the cells that are activated on exposure to sunlight – it absorbs sunlight and helps protect your DNA against the sun’s UV radiation. Basically without melanin, we’d all find moving about in daylight a lot more difficult!

In darker skin types the melanin is very active, producing pigmentation (colouration) in response to sunlight – it’s melanin that determines the tone of your skin, by the way! But this heightened activity can sometimes work against us – if exposed to excessive sunlight or heat, the melanin can start working overtime, overproducing its pigmentation in the process. Often, this leads to areas of hyper pigmentation; in other words, dark blemishes on your skin. Because of their higher concentrations of melanin coupled with their heightened levels of activity, darker skin tones are therefore more prone to this type of discolouration, requiring careful treatment in response.

Treatments

Regardless of general skin tone, everybody’s skin is still different. We never treat you based on broad assumptions, but thoroughly analyse your skin first in order to find the most effective treatment – whether a peel or laser treatment, or particular range of skincare products – that works for you. The peels we use have actually been selected for varying different skin tones, to help us minimise the risk of further damage to your skin.

Meanwhile, our eDermaroller treatment has been specifically chosen to treat people with darker skin tones, especially anyone suffering from dark blemishes. Essentially it involves the use of a wand of fine micro-tips that firmly brushes the skin, increasing the flow of blood to the surface. It’s a carefully refined art – due to the exact depth that the Dermaroller rolls over your skin, we can stimulate the skin cells into activity without over-stimulating the underlying melanin cells in the deeper skin layers beneath. The Dermaroller treatment is fantastic at reducing blemishes, evening out your skin tone while improving hydration and skin contour. Call us biased, but we think it’s a brilliant treatment, and one of the best things about it is that it’s utterly safe, with no risk involved.

We also recommend our ZO skincare range of products, which are similarly fantastic at evening out skin tones and reducing the signs of pigmentation. Whatever you choose, it can’t hurt to take advantage of our expert advice – you can book your free consultation from almost anywhere on our site, or call us on 01254 297 000.

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