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Black Skin Care
African American Skin Care
Even African Americans adopted
the hogwash philosophy back in the 50's and 60's, looking for the
slightest color variations
among themselves and using flimsy variations of color to describe
and define other African Americans. The nasty little secret was;
the lighter the skin
the better. I am ecstatic to see beautiful, dark Black African
skin and facial features in almost every major clothing catalogue,
TV show and movie.
This phenomena continues to sweep aside cultural stereotypes.
Its about time! If you have black skin, there is not a single reason
in the world that you should not love the skin you are in. That
means taking care of your skin, it is going to be with you all
the rest of your
life. Skin ColorTo really appreciate the differences in human skin color, first we should know that those differences were only recently discovered in human genes so trivial that they had been overlooked by the scientists at The Human Genome Project. (probably more than one hundred times) These people who made the discovery at The Human Genome Project were not racists or stupid. They were really blindsided by the fact that these genes were found grouped with what are known as "Human Adaptive Genes", which have been considered to be exceptionally insignificant, so much so, that they were referred to as "junk genes". Here is how they work; Take a tribe of maybe one to two hundred of the blackest Africans out of Africa and plop them down in, say, Japan. This actually happened on a larger scale in the great prehistoric human migrations. It turns out that in about one to two hundred generations, they will looked just like Japanese people do; skin color, noses and everything. This is because of climate and food. It occurs thanks to those trivial Human Adaptive Genes. Twenty thousand years ago, prior to reasonable record keeping, who would remember that one or two hundred generations ago our now Japanese looking tribe wandered out of darkest Africa, across the Red Sea to Yemen. This was at a time when much of the planet's water was bound-up as ice. A great ice age had lowered the ocean levels enough so humans likely walked across those narrows to present-day Yemen.
The ice age with it's related lack
of water i.e. rain, had brought the people from the Great Rift
Valley to the brink of starvation on the coast. So the migrations
were required for survival. (See The Discovery Channel's "The
Real Eve".) Humans did, of course, find improved food and
water sources on the main continent. Do
you like white cars, Black cars, or maybe red cars of the same
make and model? What's the big deal, it's just skin color? Black Skin Color DifferencesThe skin's Melanocytes are the cells
that produce pigment or melanin which is our skin's color. Melanocytes
produce granules known as; melanosomes and it is these granules
that deliver the color to our skin. Different ethnic groups have
different sized melanosomes. In one study; African Americans had
larger melanosomes than East Indians. East Indians had larger melanosomes
than Mexicans, who in turn had larger melanosomes than Chinese.
Of all the ethnic groups, Caucasian Europeans had the smallest melanosomes.
Black Skin Care
Black skin also has more oil glands than white skin. Black skin's
oil glands are also larger than white skin's which makes them more
susceptible to acne. The difference between a small pimple on white
skin and the same pimple on black skin is that; under a microscope,
there are vast amounts more of inflammation around the pimple on
the black skin. (Yes, I know, another unfair thing in the universe.)
Because the inflammation in black skin is worse, the resultant
scar is going to be worse. Also black skin tends to form dark black
spots with very little encouragement. This all means that black
people absolutely must take their acne more seriously than whites
in order to minimize scaring and dark spots. (see Acne) If you
see a dermatologist and get regular care for your acne, you will
suffer way less while you have the disorder and will be able to
recover your skin far better after the acne finally resolves.
Black Skin AcneAfter some years, acne does resolve to the point that you may begin to recover you facial skin. You simply cannot have any surgical skin resurfacing procedures performed while inflammatory acne remains active because the resultant infection would be catastrophic. Once your acne has resolved, this is the point where you must begin your research into physicians, usually plastic surgeons, you will select from. Black skin, as you well know by now, forms dark spots very easily in response to any kind of cut or scrape. For this reason you must be particularly careful to research your plastic surgeon extensively. The absolute worse case scenario comes for those few blacks who are prone to keloid formation. Keloids are a radically exaggeratedly form of healing in which scaring is inflated and becomes hardened to the touch. To date there has been almost no real scientific research into keloid formation. My guess is that there is not enough money in it to motivate the white establishment. If you are one of the rare black people prone to keloids and you should know it by now. Do you heal with normal flat scars that fade or does your skin form these keloids? If you form keloids, there is almost nothing you can have done to your face surgically without running the risk of permanent and horrible damage. Post acne African American women are strongly urged to seek out plastic surgeons who specialize in African American skin. In the 1990's you would have to had taken a plane half way across the country, rented a car and stayed in a hotel in order to see a famous plastic surgeon who was an expert in African American skin. Things have gotten a lot better since then, however, you still absolutely must do your homework and find the best specialty physicians in your area. In most cases you will find them in larger cities. You should plan to seek consultation (usually free) with at least two if not three of them before making your final decision on which one is best and has your best interest at heart. Which one of them has the most experience? You can get a good idea of a surgeon's experience and the quality of their work by showing up an hour early than your appointment and paging through the case books in their waiting room. There should be several books showing before and after photos of their patients. Ask the receptionist to provide you with these books if they are not right out in plain sight and do not take no for an answer, because these books should be displayed publicly and in spades. If there are no such books, run, don't walk out of the place. These books are typically arranged by type of surgery. If you are in the market for facial skin resurfacing, skip over the boob job and tummy tuck books. Stay focused! Keep notes on your impressions of everything, like how smoothly or harried the office seems to run. How many African American women can you count in the facial skin resurfacing book? How good a job does it look like they received? How many patients (not counting their guess') are in the waiting room with you and how long do they wait? Some outer offices are opulent with fixation objects like full sized white marble statues of naked women. What kind of a person would try so hard to impress you? It might be an arrogant man who is all impressed with himself. However, if he is far and away the finest, most experienced African American skin "resurfacer", you can bite your tongue, cough up the extra two grand he charges to maintain his impressive office and let him do the job. You are only going to do this once. Look for the best surgeon, not the best bedside manner, from hard experience, they are regrettably unrelated. Find out who does the African American movie stars and pop stars. This is serious, one-time business and you are urged to treat it as such. Microdermabrasion AcneAfter acne goes away and if scaring is not serious and/or you have dark spots you may want to give home microdermabrasion a try. It takes about eight weeks of daily treatments to get good results. You must be faithful to the daily treatment schedule. Home microdermabrasion is inexpensive and requires only about one to two minutes per day of extra shower time. It also dramatically reduces the appearance of facial wrinkles. (if you have any) Normally an 8oz jar of microdermabrasion cream will last most people the eight week mandatory trial period. It certainly seems worth a try before dishing out five to ten thousand dollars of your personal savings for surgery. The risks of home microdermabrasion are far less than surgery, amounting to some mere blushing of the skin if you are too aggressive with yourself. Most people become quite enthusiastic about the results of home microdermabrasion. |
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It
is deeply embarrassing; the extent to which our culture equates
beauty with goodness. This theme appears in songs, movies and
books ad nauseam. That's the bad news. The good news is that
now dark black African skin and facial features are recognized
as attractive in our superficial culture. (see About Us) Even while
dark African skin
and features have always been objectively beautiful, there were
very many white people (there still are a few dinosaurs around)
who saw their skin
color as a sign of superiority.