Moles run in my family, on both sides, so it wasn’t unusual when I started getting them to. By the time I was 20, my left foot had over 50 of them on the top of it. Aside from nieces using them to play dot to dot, it was no big deal.
Now here’s the weird part. They’re all gone except for the largest one, and even it has shrunk, and now is nothing more than a mark on the skin instead of a raised bump. What could’ve caused this?
(I’m not looking for medical advice, just opinions on what could’ve caused this.)
I seem to recall hearing once that moles have a ‘lifespan’, but I can’t find anything to back this up on a quick google search. (Might help if I knew the proper medical term for these things–searching for ‘moles’ brings me lots of information about fuzzy garden critters with big claws and poor eyesight who say “bo 'urr” a lot.) Anecdotally, I know that several of mine have faded over the years, though I don’t track them closely enough to say whether any may have disappeared entirely.
The technical name for a mole is a nevus, plural nevi. As for lifetime, I have found some sources which say they may go away (example, also a Yahoo answers result where somebody claimed “50 years”, no cite), but nothing definite on how long they last or why they go away.
A lot of different doodads on the skin are called moles. Yours may have been something else, or some type of mole that doesn’t last. I was born with a common type of mole on my shoulder that has faded and shrunk to the point of being unnoticeable.
Is it possible they were warts? The proper immune response will kill the virus and they will disappear, sometimes leaving a mark. I’ve had a few tiny cysts that also darkened, but eventually dried up and basically disappeared.
The dermatologist I saw a few years back said they were moles. She was amazed at how many I had. (I was worried they might have been a form of melanoma since so many came up.) Never knew they could go away though.