Vitiligo - a mulitcoloured skin.

Dear General public, apologies for the delay in this blog (yes, I am ashamed, one week of saying that I will post on a Friday, and whoa, I didn’t post!)

Anyway, over the past week, my dear general public, I have been disturbed. Whilst scrolling down my Facebook page (as you do when you’re a teenager who’s supposed to be revising for exams) there was a picture of a girl that was getting all kinds of abuse! Why, I hear you ask? She had two different colours of skin.

Right, this infuriated me for three main reasons:

1) She was stunning, and her face looked no different from anyone else’s (she had been granted with two eyes in the right place and all that…)

2) There are all kinds of issues to do with racism, and what colour you skin is, so how having both colours (therefore not making you either ‘Black’ or ‘Caucasian’ or any other particular skin colour) is therefore not a justified reason not to like someone or to judge them. If anything having both skin colours should make you immune from any kind of racial discrimination, but somehow this miraculously isn’t the case.

3) She was clearly happy with this photo of herself, she smiled into the camera lens, so what right does the world of Facebook have to put her down and treat her badly?

 

Therefore my dear general public, I think it is only right that we all understand vitiligo, a skin condition caused due to the lack of pigment in the skin.  Then maybe people won’t see vitiligo as an abnormality (especially since it affects around 1 in 100 people, including famous faces such as Michael Jackson). This is going to be a slightly more serious particle, my general public, (hence no Vietnamese at the beginning), but I feel this is a particle of fact that everyone must know about.

Skin is made of two layers, the top layer is simply an epidermis which at the bottom has two types of cells: keratinocytes and melanocytes. The melanocytes are the cells which produce pigment for your skin. Vitiligo is simply when your melanocytes stop making melanin (the hormone that produces pigment for your skin). Therefore, the only difference between black and Caucasian skin, is that black skins’ melanocytes are more active, and  produce more pigment/melanin.

Vitiligo causes the sufferers skin to become ‘patchy’, usually around the face, neck, scalp hands and knees – but can occur anywhere on the body. It is not contagious and is not inherited, although your chances of having vitiligo are slightly greater if there is a family history of the condition, and can develop in anyone at any age.

Vitiligo is painless and does not have any side effects, but the sufferer can feel very self-conscious and feel uncomfortable about their appearance (so how is writing hate about them going to help!?)

 

Now general public, this is really just an overview of vitiligo, and what it is. But I sincerely hope that you now understand vitiligo and do not judge or treat people differently because of the colour of their skin. I also do not wish to have offended anyone by using the phrases ‘black’ and ‘Caucasian’.

Thanks for reading and I will see you next Friday,

Particle complete.

Sushis o0