What Is Skin Pigmentation?

Skin pigmentation is the color of your skin. It's determined by the amount of melanin, a natural pigment that gives your skin, hair, and eyes their unique color. Your skin could become darker or lighter due to changes in your body’s production of melanin.\

A variety of factors could cause this, from the genes you’re born with to skin damage from acne or sun exposure.

Learn more about what could trigger shifts in skin pigmentation, the role of genetics in skin color, changes or problems involving skin pigmentation, and how to treat them.

 

Causes of Skin Pigmentation

Your skin tone is the result of a complex process during which special cells inside the outer layer of your skin called melanocytes produce melanin. Inside these special skin cells are organelles (or mini-organs of the cell) called melanosomes. Variations in the color of your skin depend on the amount, size, and functioning of these tiny melanin factories.

 

There are two key types of melanin:

Eumelanin is brown and black in color and protects your skin. It does so by limiting the amount of harmful ultraviolet (UV) rays that can break through and pick up reactive oxygen radicals which—if left alone—could damage your cells and DNA and potentially lead to chronic health conditions like cancer.

Pheomelanin, on the other hand, is yellow and red in color. Unlike eumelanin, pheomelanin provides very little protection from UV rays and can actually support the production of reactive oxygen radicals and the damage they cause.1

Your skin pigmentation is determined by the balance of these types of melanin in your skin. This can shift depending on your hormones, interactions with other cells in your body, the impact of certain genes, and more.