What causes brown spots on the skin, and what can be done about them?
There are a lot of reasons someone might have brown spots on the skin. One possibility is that the spots are left over from acne. As acne lesions heal, they can leave red or brownish spots that can take a long time to fade. Spots can also occur from direct damage from the sunlike freckles or lentigines, sometimes mistermed age spots or liver spots. (Lentigines have nothing to do with your livertheyre caused by sun. Theyre age-related only in the sense that you have to be old enough to have had sufficient sun exposure to get them.) A third cause of spots is melasma, a mottled-looking brown discoloration on the cheeks and forehead. Melasma is more common in women, though it does occasionally affect men. Its an inherited condition whose severity depends on the level of female hormones present, and on sun exposure. Women who tend to get melasma will get it more severely if theyre on birth control pills or when theyre pregnant. And, theyll find it gets worse with sun exposure. In each of th
