You and Your Melanin
How Your Melanin Affects Your Skincare Goals
In the earlier email this month, I talked about melanin and how we as estheticians use the Fitzpatrick and Lancer scales to keep treatments safe and proactive.
If you didn’t read the last email just to recap, melanin is the part of your skin that provides the pigment responsible for your skin’s color.
In the skincare world the Fitzpatrick and Lancer scales are tools we use to determine one’s constitutive skin tone. Your constitutive skin tone is the genetically determined color of your skin in the absence of any external factors.
Knowing this information is when things get interesting and can help you target your skincare goals more effectively!
Our bodies produce two different kinds of melanin. These types are eumelanin and pheomelanin.
Eumelanin is a darker pigment that makes up black and brown pigments. It is a large, dense oblong molecule, has a slight UV protective factor, is not very soluble, and is more reactive to trauma and inflammation in the skin.
Pheomelanin is a smaller molecule (think of eumelanin as jelly beans vs. pheomelanin as sand) responsible for red and yellow pigments. Pheomelanin has little to no UV protection, is very soluble and is not as reactive of eumelanin.
Although all skin tones have both types, the higher you are on the Fitzpatrick and Lancer scales the more eumelanin you have and the lower on the scales that you are the more pheomelenin you have.
Since the size and solubility of the melanin molecule and how reactive that molecule is contributes to how the skin responds to treatment, treating melanin rich skin can be a little bit tricky.
In my experience if there aren’t any contraindications most if not all treatments can be done on all skin tones. It’s just a matter of adjusting the intensity and the number of treatments needed.
Curious how you can use this information with your skincare goals or have questions?
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