What Do You Know About Freckles?

Let us know what provides skin its colour, so as to understand what are freckles and how do they appear. Melanin is the most important pigment that decides the colour of the skin. We may say that different skin colours of various races are due to difference in the amount of melanin.

In lower forms of life, it is normally the melanin which enables certain fish and lizard to change their colour. Its most important function, in the human being, apart from containing the colour, is to protect us against the harmful effects of too much exposure to sunshine.

Melanin is produced by a complete network of special cells that are scattered through the lower layer of the epidermis, which is the thin outer part of our skin. We call these calls “melanocytes”. Let us understand what the freckles are. Freckles are simply a bunching-up of these melanocytes in spots. This is the reason why the freckles have that brownish colour, the colour of the pigment melanin. We observe that there are people who have freckles and others who do not have. The reason is traced back to heredity. Our parents are the deciding factor, whether we will have the freckles or not.

The colour of freckles – in reality the colour of melanin in them can vary from light tan to dark brown, which is purely depending on exposure to sun and heat. Sunshine darkens them and can cause new melanin to form.