Skin lightening is a more popular but controversial method than skin darkening that patients seem to inquire from dermatologists in many countries.
The ingredient hydroquinone I believe has been either banned entirely in the EU or restricted to only a prescription medicine at no more than 4%. There are many other ingredients however that people who lighten skin say are as effective though governments seem to be catching up and trying to clamp down as they have been shown to have various levels of undesirable effects on the body.
Back to my question, are there medications that do the opposite; darken human skin? I know a Canadian American classmate of mine was given some medicine to ‘even’ the skin on his face because he had some significantly noticeable blotches however, I strongly doubt it had anything to do with vitilgo as they were moderately lighter than the rest of his dark face and never lightened over time or grew to other parts of his face.
I’ve heard birth control even in men can cause this? How true is this?
That’s got to be the very best username/first post combination of all time … congratulations rastafarian, welcome to the SDMB and may all your posts here be so … “enlightened” …
Here is a paragraph from the Wiki article on Griffin cited above:
It sounds like a treatment I could not recommend but it apparently worked. One black man saw through the disguise, I recall from having the read the book when it first came out.
Investigative journalist Grace Halsell did a Griffin and took chemicals to darken her skin, too. She tried living Black for a while in the 1960s. The book Soul Sister reports her experience. Years later, she died of skin cancer. Don’t take those drugs if you can help it.
When Black Like Me was published, everybody was amazed at what Griffin had discovered firsthand about Black life. Malcolm X retorted something like: You’re impressed by a white guy turning black for a few months, then turning white again? Have you ever thought what it’s like to be black every day of your life?
When I was in junior high in the late 1970s, someone put out “tanning pills”, which I know now were beta carotene, and would give skin a bit of an orange glow at supratherapeutic doses. One of my classmates, being a junior high girl, smuggled a bottle of them into her house and took quite a few of them before going to bed, and when she woke up the next morning, orange from top to bottom, her parents shoved her in the car and made a beeline to the nearest ER.
The instant they walked in, the ER staff knew exactly what she’d been up to. :smack:
Those didn’t stay on the market very long, for obvious reasons.
p.s. I’ve heard of this happening to people who went overboard on juicing.
