Why are we called people with Skin of Color?

Of late, you may be hearing more and more about Skin of Color. For example, my sunscreen book is called Sunscreens for Skin of Color. We Indians are considered as people with Skin of color, or as having ethnic skin. Along with us, other populations that fall in the SOC – skin of color group - includes all of the Asians, including the Chinese and Japanese in addition to Native Americans, Africans, African Americans, Middle Eastern populations, Latin Americans – basically any one with anything other than white Caucasian skin.

To keep it very simple, there are 3 ethnicities that are commonly referred to, when we speak about melanin content and skin types. White skinned people come under the Caucasian group. The rest of us would fall under one of the two groups – Negroid and Mongoloid, together considered as Skin of Color, which simply means that we have higher levels of the darker melanin pigment in our skin. There are two types of melanin in human skin, and the darker eumelanin protects us from the sun's rays.

If you look at the map below for indigenous people, you can see that the dark skinned populations were mostly grouped around the Equator, with lighter skin types towards the Poles.

Now why are we talking about skin of colour in the 21^st century?

That’s because for a very long period of time, no one was! Which meant that all the treatment protocols, product trends, skin care routines were all handed to us based on Caucasian skin studies, while our ethnic skin is completely different. This also meant that we were given to use sunscreens that protected us mostly in the UVB spectrum, whereas we needed more protection in the UVA spectrum against pigmentation. This also meant that lasers  and similar treatments that worked so well for white skin, did not work for dark skin. In fact, post laser pigmentation was a common problem in SOC. Until, we learnt to customize them for our skin type.

An example of one such change is that we moved from ablative laser devices to fractional laser devices. This helped the skin to heal faster post laser treatments, which is very crucial to preventing pigmentation in SOC. The graph below shows the dramatic increase in the number of publications in SOC, over the years.

Especially in the last 2-3 decades, there has been a lot of work done around understanding how melanin works for Skin of Color. Outside of customizing laser devices to serve skin of color as above, we have come to understand how skin care works for SOC. For example, we understand that SOC ages with pigmentation and not with wrinkles. We also understand that photoaging is a more real concern for SOC than skin cancer. Accordingly, our skin care routines, have now come to reflect more of what we need for Indian skin types.

In fact, the landmark change now is that we do not classify skin types by our skin’s reactivity to the sun, but by our skin colour itself. More about it, in upcoming posts.