Assessing Skin Color - Art of Ayurveda Skin Color 1 of 9

Well, normal skin color actually varies a lot by ethnicity. Um, the lightness and darkness of a of the skin is due to the pigment melanin. And people who have both light and dark complexion have melanin. And uh, and you say, well, how could both have it? If melanin is what makes the skin dark, how can a person with light skin have melanin? And the answer to that is that there are two different types of melanin. There's and I'm not even going to try well I will try I will try to pronounce these correctly. Umelanin and fomelanin. Um umelanin is more of the black and brown hues that you think of with people tanning and uh people with darker skin tones. Um uh and then fomelanin is more red and yellow hues. Uh and this is predominant in people with paler skin. Now compare the difference between my wife and I going to the beach. I have Italian blood and Italy is very close to Africa and um and there's and so you know we're um as a as Italians we tanny very easily and of course because of the latitude but I also um think that there's just a lot of u uh real interracial marrying in uh the Italian gene pool and so I go in the sun and I will uh tan and get very dark uh pretty easily. And my wife when she goes out in the sun, she will turn red even if she's not burnt. So, I'm going to just make a wild guess here that she's got the f theome melanin type cuz her skin is very fair. She almost has like Nordic skin. Um uh very white skin, blondish kind of hair, blue eyes. um although her hair is not very blonde and so she doesn't have those dark colors that um that I tend to have in my skin uh she has probably the f theomelanin type. And so here we see an example of these two different skin types uh right there. The uh darker hair, the dark brown eyes, the darker skin, and then the f theomelanin type would be blonde or red hair with fairer skin and green eyes or blue eyes. So color variances. Uh so this by the way does not indicate any pathology, right? This is just normal natural genetic ethnic uh coloring to the skin. Probably adaptive for wherever your ancestors uh whatever environment your ancestors lived in and the degree of their sun exposure uh which depends on latitude um primarily but also lifestyle, right? If you're a if you're a laborer out in the sun, uh you're going to have different tan than u than somebody who is uh a laborer working at a desk all day. Anyway, color variances beyond your natural genetic melanin skin type uh point to imbalances, but the genetic ones aren't indicative of an imbalance. It's