Melanin – which comes from the Greek word, melas, meaning dark – is a group of pigments found throughout the natural world, responsible for the brown spots on bananas, the ink of cephalopods such as squid, and even the colour of ants.
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After all, melanin has been used, along with facial features and hair type, for more than four centuries to sort the world into a hierarchy, with white-skinned groups at the top.
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Study music brown and pink tones skin#
This brand name is eye-catching precisely because, in nearly every other circumstance, the amount of melanin in your skin is directly proportional to the amount of discrimination you encounter in everyday life.
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But what made my own ignorance all the more unsettling was that this had never occurred to me as a problem, even though I am a person of colour.Ī t a Black Lives Matter protest in Brighton this summer, I saw a black teenager proudly wearing a T-shirt bearing the word “MELANINAIRE”. “Patients are left seeking equal care in a system that is entirely built on white skin,” he wrote. In June, Michael Mackley, a third-year medical student in Canada, wrote a widely shared Twitter thread about feeling unprepared to spot skin changes in a black patient. I am not the only one reflecting on this failure of medical education. Dark skin had only ever been used to demonstrate these dermatological rarities, and never as part of core teaching on common disorders. I could recall only three occasions when dark skin was used to demonstrate a skin problem: once, to illustrate how black skin can heal in thick bands called keloid scars once, during a session about syphilis and other genital ulcers and once, in a presentation on vitiligo, a disorder in which patches of skin lose their pigment. I thought back to the dermatology training I had received in medical school. But, after he’d gone, I was left feeling unsettled, because if this had been the first time he’d had this rash, I would probably have been way off the mark with my diagnosis.
Study music brown and pink tones trial#
In the end, it was a straightforward case, which simply required a trial of a different cream. He was having a flare-up and wondered if there was an alternative treatment he could try. “I have psoriasis.” I went back to his medical record, and there it was, a listed diagnosis that I had failed to spot: chronic plaque psoriasis. But he reassured me: “I get these quite a lot.” He saw my blank look and explained, politely. I was initially quite alarmed, thinking of a host of possible causes, some really serious. He lifted up his T-shirt, showing me his chest, and I was shocked to see a splash of rough, silvery patches all over his torso. It turned out he was not just a music fan he was a roadie and gig manager. It was well into music festival season, and he wore several wristbands to prove it.
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He looked younger than he was, wearing a black T-shirt and cut-off denim shorts. My patient was a rangy black man, early 40s, with hair just starting to grey at the temples. My only source of cool air was a skylight, but having it open meant that every so often stray black garden ants were dropping between me and my patients, making me jumpy. It was “flying ant day”: that moment every summer when the heat inspires thousands of ants to grow wings and swarm in their thousands, mating mid-air in a huge, frenzied orgy. A s I sat making small talk with my patient, I was trying not to think about the ants.