(I just found this post over on my blog; thought I had published it there but it was languishing in my drafts folder. I wrote it nearly 1.5 years ago now… This blog post wasn’t intended to be RatzillaCosme content but I thought I would post it here anyway.)
Do topical products work when it comes to hyperpigmentation? Some influencers recommend certain products while others say that products take a long time to work and are only a temporary fix. At the same time, some say lasers can backfire and lead to more discolouration.
Professional treatments such as chemical peels, lasers, and IPL are only as good as the person administering them. It’s like baking. We can buy the same ingredients, follow the same recipe, and use the same oven but very few will have the technical know-how and skills to make a cake perfectly every time.
There is only one thing that works for pretty much all kinds of pigment and that is the one that no one likes to hear — sun protection. Not just using a sunscreen every day, but avoiding the sun like the plague all year round.
Sun avoidance can be more helpful than any laser treatment and a good deal of the pigment just fades by doing nothing else except protecting the skin. It’s a very difficult thing to do because most people seem to believe they don’t need sun protection if they’re only walking to a car or they don’t need to avoid the sun because they already have on “far superior” sunscreen. But frankly, if any of that was remotely true, they would not have the pigment issues in the first place.
Topicals and beauty products — whether it be hydroquinone, arbutin, kojic acid, vitamin C, etc. — can only get so deep into the skin where they can target the pigment (or the pigment pathways) so it is only effective for the surface (epidermal) pigment. For deep-seated (dermal) pigmentation, topical options cannot penetrate deep enough into the skin to have an effect. To give you a reference point, tattoos are considered permanent because the pigment is deposited in the dermal layer of the skin. The same location as dermal pigmentation.
If you have deep-sitting pigment then getting rid of it is like trying to remove a tattoo with some vitamin C serum or AHA toner. (They both sit in the dermis.) It doesn’t matter if it’s a cult product recommended by influencers with credentials. The price tag or the cult following cannot change biology or break the laws of physics.
If things backfire (which can happen with misusing or overusing drugs) then more pigment is usually the unfortunate result, especially on darker skins that are already more predisposed to hyperpigmentation. Furthermore, not everyone is a candidate for things like chemical peels, lasers, or IPL.
Given that a good deal of pigment issues are age spots, the unfortunate fact is that those come from cumulative sun exposure, which means sun damage.
Sun damage is not currently repairable. Cells are capable of dealing with some degree of damage successfully. Once those mechanisms start to fail due to being past their biological prime; however, the damage adds up. No serum or procedure can change a thing about it — they can only target the symptoms. “DNA repair” cream is not a thing that works outside a petri dish. Even if the age spot pigments are completely cleared, they will always come back, regardless of how they were treated because nothing can undo the damage. The signs of damage — the dark spots — will keep rearing their head again and again.
If you’re dealing with discolouration then it may be a question of motivation or discipline because most kinds of pigments are hard to treat even under the most ideal circumstances. It’s not something that will happen in 3–5 weeks and then you can never think about it again.
