What Causes White Stretch Marks?

Stretch marks come in all different colors—red, brown, and white are the most common. They can affect both men and women, and can occur anywhere on your body.  They happen because of a (fairly) rapid increase in size of the body where your skin just cannot keep pace. Pregnancy, puberty and rapid weight gain can cause stretch marks.

*Photo courtesy of ritesofpassage at blogspot.com.

Why the different colors, then? The reason is due to both the underlying color of your skin and the age of the stretch marks. New stretch marks tend to be red or brown whereas older ones fade to white.

At Celibre Medical, we have many different help with the color and texture of your stretch marks. We think it is important for you to know, however, that since stretch marks are a type of scar, the goal of any laser therapy is to improve the way they look, not remove them completely.

Red, brown and textured stretch marks are the easiest to treat, because our lasers are good at targeting excessive blood vessels (red), pigmentation (brown) and lost collagen (textured) that cause them to look that way. White stretch marks are a a different story. Hypopigmentation is the medical term for lightened skin or loss of skin pigmentation. White stretch marks are the hardest type to treat.

Although we can sometimes improve the appearance of light stretch marks, this is associated with improving the texture of indented stretch marks at the same time.  For flat, white stretch marks, we do not have an option because lasers cannot add color to the skin.

Stretch marks are difficult to treat, but there are options available.  Call today to see if we can help improve your stretch marks.

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