Geez..I feel really stupid now. I thought that this was a skin condition that only affected people of color. I really cringed typing that,but since it has always been described as a skin condition that makes you lose pigmentation,I figured since white people are already white,we could'nt get any whiter.

Tangerine that was very nice of you to share something personal,I definately learned something from it.

EmeraldSkies said:

Nah vitiligo affects everybody. I knew for years white folks got vitiligo too. It don't make you white, it makes you pale.

for searching the Internet and other reference sources

Depigmentation

Dermatology

Melanocytes

Photochemotherapy

Psoralens

What Is Vitiligo?
Melanocytes (MEL-a-no-sites) are special skin cells that make the pigment* that colors the skin, hair, eyes, and body linings. If these cells die or cannot make pigment, the affected skin gets lighter or completely white, causing vitiligo (vit-i-LY-go). The hair in affected areas also may turn white, and people with dark skin may notice a loss of color inside their mouths. No one knows for sure what makes melanocytes die or stop working in vitiligo.

* pigment
(PIG-ment) is a substance that imparts color to another substance.
Who Gets Vitiligo?

Vitiligo affects people of all races and both sexes equally. It affects one or two out of every 100 people. About half of all people who have vitiligo begin to lose pigment before they are 20 years old.

Vitiligo is common in people with certain immune system diseases and in children with parents who have the condition. However, most people with vitiligo have no immune system disease, and most children will not get vitiligo even if a parent has it. In fact, most people with vitiligo are in good general health and do not have a family history of the condition.

Vitiligo is more obvious in people with dark skin. Light-skinned people may notice the contrast between patches of vitiligo and areas of suntanned skin in the summer. The amount of pigment that is lost varies from person to person. The first white patches often occur on the hands, feet, arms, face, or lips. Other common areas for patches to appear are the armpits, the groin (the area where the inner thighs join the trunk), and around the navel (belly button) and genitals.

There is no way to know if vitiligo will spread to other parts of the body, but it usually does spread over time. For some people, this spread occurs rapidly, but for other people, it takes place over many years. Both sides of the body usually are affected in a similar way. There may be a few patches or there may be many.

How Is Vitiligo Diagnosed and Treated?
Diagnosis
To diagnose vitiligo, the doctor may ask about such things as a persons symptoms, whether or not the person has an immune system disorder, and whether or not vitiligo runs in the person’s family. The doctor also may suggest various tests to rule out other medical problems that can cause light skin patches.

Treatment
Vitiligo does not always need treatment. For some people with light skin, simply avoiding a suntan on areas of normal skin is enough to make the patches of vitiligo almost unnoticeable. Other people use makeup, skin dyes, or self-tanning products to cover up the vitiligo. Self-tanning products are creams that give the skin a tan color, but not a true tan. The color tends to wear off after a few days. None of these things changes the condition, but they can make the vitiligo less noticeable. In children, vitiligo usually is just covered up.

In adults, if covering up the vitiligo is not enough, a medical treatment may be tried, although results often cannot be seen for 6 to 18 months. The choice of treatment depends on the person’s wishes, how many white patches the person has, and how widespread the patches are. Not every treatment works for every person. There are several choices:

Corticosteroid (kor-ti-ko-STEER-oid) creams can be applied to the skin and sometimes can return color to small areas of vitiligo.
PUVA, which stands for psoralen (SOR-a-len) and ultraviolet A therapy. Ultraviolet A is the part of sunlight that can cause the skin to tan, and psoralens are substances that react with ultraviolet light to darken the skin. This medication is taken by mouth or applied to the skin, and then the light patches of skin are exposed to ultraviolet A light from a special lamp.
Skin grafting is an operation that involves moving skin from normal areas to white patches. It is useful only for a small number of people with vitiligo.
Depigmentation therapy involves using medication to fade the normal skin to match the whitened areas of vitiligo.
Living with Vitiligo
The white patches of vitiligo have no natural protection from the sun and are very easily sunburned. People with vitiligo should be careful to avoid exposure to midday sun, to cover up with clothing and a hat, and to use a sunscreen with a high SPF (sun protection factor) rating.

See also

Albinism

Skin Conditions

Resources
American Academy of Dermatology, 930 North Meacham Road, Schaumburg, IL 60173. The American Academy of Dermatology publishes a pamphlet called Vitiligo and posts a fact sheet about it at its website. Telephone 888-462-DERM http://www.aad.org/aadpam...iligo.html

The U.S. National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases posts a fact sheet called Questions and Answers About Vitiligo at its website. To order a pamphlet, contact the NIAMS Information Clearinghouse, 1 AMS Circle, Bethesda, MD 20892-3675. Telephone 301-495-4484 http://www.nih.gov/niams/...tiligo.htm

National Vitiligo Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 6337, Tyler, TX 75703. This is a national group for people with vitiligo. Telephone 903-531-0074 http://nvfi.org

http://www.encyclopedia.c...00422.html
[Edited 8/22/09 19:53pm]

EmeraldSkies said:

Nah vitiligo affects everybody. I knew for years white folks got vitiligo too. It don't make you white, it makes you pale.

Timmy84 said:

Well I know this now. I feel like such an ass.

EmeraldSkies said:

don't feel like an a** you learn something new every day. knowledge is power right
Your Welcome.
[Edited 8/22/09 20:33pm]

I'm still a bit undecided about the vitiligo stories. I think everyone will just have to wait to see how much of that is true and how much of that is him trying to be caucasoid. What if he had some vitiligo and just used that as an excuse to turn entirely white? I think a line in "Morphine" said more truth than we like to admit about his feelings "you hate your race, your just a liar". Remember the time of bad? He went totally white overnight and I remember the lack of comment about it by everyone. The only people who said anything were Jermaine and Paul Mooney (comedian) at least those are the only people I remember expressing outrage or dissapointment. He was not even questioned directly about it until the Oprah interview many years later. My question is, If he loved his people, and if he had vitiligo, for his own people's sake, why didn't he say this so his people wouldn't get the wrong impression? It's obvious that he suffered from self loathing, as all of us who aren't waspish white people usually do. That's a stage people go through, but he got stuck in his, I remember being ashamed of myself, but you mature and realize someone else taught you to feel that way and they are the ones that are fucked up. Does self-hatred ever go away? No, but you manage to balance it out. Black people don't need their greatest, most famous entertainer changing colors, it sends a very negative message. He actually took the ambivalence that we all feel and put it all over his physical being, not a pretty sight.

I'm still a bit undecided about the vitiligo stories. I think everyone will just have to wait to see how much of that is true and how much of that is him trying to be caucasoid. What if he had some vitiligo and just used that as an excuse to turn entirely white? I think a line in "Morphine" said more truth than we like to admit about his feelings "you hate your race, your just a liar". Remember the time of bad? He went totally white overnight and I remember the lack of comment about it by everyone. The only people who said anything were Jermaine and Paul Mooney (comedian) at least those are the only people I remember expressing outrage or dissapointment. He was not even questioned directly about it until the Oprah interview many years later. My question is, If he loved his people, and if he had vitiligo, for his own people's sake, why didn't he say this so his people wouldn't get the wrong impression? It's obvious that he suffered from self loathing, as all of us who aren't waspish white people usually do. That's a stage people go through, but he got stuck in his, I remember being ashamed of myself, but you mature and realize someone else taught you to feel that way and they are the ones that are fucked up. Does self-hatred ever go away? No, but you manage to balance it out. Black people don't need their greatest, most famous entertainer changing colors, it sends a very negative message. He actually took the ambivalence that we all feel and put it all over his physical being, not a pretty sight.

I just gotta post this cuz this a great song and love the dance. I have the audio version of this thanks gosh.

tangerine7 said:

Love this song,and the video is great also.

If he hadn't gone through with the depigmentation process he would have had patches all over and would have looked like a Dalmation. The specialists said that the lupus exacerbated the vitiligo. The plastic surgeries don't necessarily mean that he didn't want to be black. He had Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Case in point the cat lady:


He needed to go to a psychiatrist for his problems. I don't think Michael didn't want to be black. Michael didn't want to be Michael imo. & when he did tell people about his disease they didn't believe him. Not even Quincy Jones believed him. Deepak Chopra said that both diseases were very traumatic and embarrassing for him. He experienced a lot of shame because of it.

I'm still a bit undecided about the vitiligo stories. I think everyone will just have to wait to see how much of that is true and how much of that is him trying to be caucasoid. What if he had some vitiligo and just used that as an excuse to turn entirely white? I think a line in "Morphine" said more truth than we like to admit about his feelings "you hate your race, your just a liar". Remember the time of bad? He went totally white overnight and I remember the lack of comment about it by everyone. The only people who said anything were Jermaine and Paul Mooney (comedian) at least those are the only people I remember expressing outrage or dissapointment. He was not even questioned directly about it until the Oprah interview many years later. My question is, If he loved his people, and if he had vitiligo, for his own people's sake, why didn't he say this so his people wouldn't get the wrong impression? It's obvious that he suffered from self loathing, as all of us who aren't waspish white people usually do. That's a stage people go through, but he got stuck in his, I remember being ashamed of myself, but you mature and realize someone else taught you to feel that way and they are the ones that are fucked up. Does self-hatred ever go away? No, but you manage to balance it out. Black people don't need their greatest, most famous entertainer changing colors, it sends a very negative message. He actually took the ambivalence that we all feel and put it all over his physical being, not a pretty sight.

If he hadn't gone through with the depigmentation process he would have had patches all over and would have looked like a Dalmation. The specialists said that the lupus exacerbated the vitiligo. The plastic surgeries don't necessarily mean that he didn't want to be black. He had Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Case in point the cat lady:


He needed to go to a psychiatrist for his problems. I don't think Michael didn't want to be black. Michael didn't want to be Michael imo. & when he did tell people about his disease they didn't believe him. Not even Quincy Jones believed him. Deepak Chopra said that both diseases were very traumatic and embarrassing for him. He experienced a lot of shame because of it.

Timmy84 said:

LMAO! Everytime I hear Randy say "shut up!" I laugh so loud! He was mad!

Brett Ratner on Michael Jackson: 'You felt like God was within him'
June 26, 2009 | 12:25 pm

My father loves to brag to his friends that while his son is a big-shot Hollywood reporter, it was his father who actually met Michael Jackson. Until he retired a few years ago, my dad had a store called the 24 Collection on the Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach that specialized in fashion, jewelry, art and one-of-a-kind oddities (I still have a clock set into a Cuban cigar box with a portrait of Fidel Castro on the clock face). One day Brett Ratner, who grew up in Miami and whose mother was a regular customer at the store, called my dad and asked if he could bring his pal Michael Jackson by to look around. As he often did as a courtesy for celebrities who might be annoyed or hounded, my father closed the store that afternoon and put the staff at Jackson's disposal.

"Michael walked around every inch of the store, feeling things, smelling things," my father remembers. "He'd ask questions about what this was or that was, where it was from, how we found it. I made sure the staff didn't intrude on him, although one person did ask for an autograph, which made them an ex-employee right away. But Michael was just off in his own world, curious about everything he saw."

I think my dad got his hopes up when he saw that Jackson was also accompanied by an aide who had a zippered envelope full of cash. But the King of Pop never bought anything. After spending an hour in the store, he just thanked everyone for letting him look around and left.

I called Ratner this morning to ask him how he became such fast friends with Jackson. It turns out that they met in 1998 when Ratner was finishing his first "Rush Hour" picture. One day, Chris Tucker was doing a scene and broke into a wild, Michael Jackson-style dance. The sequence was so funny that when Ratner had test screenings of the film, it got one of the biggest laughs in the picture. But because it was an obvious Jackson impression, Ratner knew he had to clear it with the pop star before he could put it in the movie.

That presented a problem, since Jackson was so reclusive that even Ratner, one of the great celebrity schmoozers of our time, couldn't get to him. He even called Jackson's Neverland ranch but never got anywhere. Then he got lucky. "My editor was talking to the projectionist who ran the final screening and it turned out that he was Michael's personal projectionist," Ratner told me today. "So I gave him the print and asked him to play the beginning of the second reel for Michael, which had Chris' dance in it."

Two days later Ratner picked up the phone and heard the soft, feathery voice of Michael Jackson. So what did Michael say? Keep reading.

"Michael said he'd watched the whole movie and loved it, especially the scene Chris did with his dance. He said, 'You have my permission to use whatever you want.' " That was great, but Ratner needed something in writing. When he asked Jackson to sign something on a piece of paper, Jackson simply invited him up to the ranch. "So I drove up there and walked in, with all his giraffes and other animals, all out there to greet me." Ratner recalls. "I ended up staying at the ranch and we just became great friends. We both had this huge, almost childlike fascination with movies and music and all kinds of entertainment."

Over the years, Ratner and Jackson spent an enormous amount of time together. They would film each other, with Jackson asking Ratner about how he became a film director and Ratner asking Jackson about how he became an entertainer. "I have hours of footage of us, sitting around in our pajamas, with me asking him about what kind of music he loved as a kid, what kind of books he had on the wall as a kid. When you were with him, you really felt like God was within him. He was an amazing, superhuman kind of person, but he always treated you as an equal. He would be your friend and he never asked for anything in return."

One of their favorite activities was to have dance-offs in the game room at Jackson's house. Jackson would put on a record, usually a song by his sister, Janet, and unleash some awesome dance moves. Then Ratner or Chris Tucker, who would sometimes come along, would play Michael's records and dance along to them. I asked Ratner if that felt a little like a mere mortal playing one-on-one with LeBron James. "Hey, I wasn't self-conscious. I'm a pretty good dancer. It was just fun to do it together."

When they weren't dancing, Ratner and Jackson would watch movies together. He says they must've watched the original version of "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" 50 times over the years. "I know that people looked at Michael and thought he was strange, but to me, he was fascinating," Ratner says. "He was the most inspirational person in my life. His one dream was to cure all the sick children in the world. And when I'd say, 'Isn't that impossible?' Michael would just start to cry. He was very emotional about things that moved him. I guess you'd have to say he was a pure innocent in a world that wasn't so innocent anymore."

http://latimesblogs.latim...human.html

Quincy's ass still think it was chemical peels.

EmeraldSkies said:

yeah agreed definetly. I have the album Dangerous as well as the Remember The Times Remixes,but I didn't have the Video Version import, a friend sent it to me a week ago. I'm so happy for that,I love this version,I wonder why it wasn't on the Remember the Times Maxi?

Timmy84 said:

He looks dumb now since all the doctors spoke out and confirmed it. Chemical peels and bleaching creams will get the skin lighter but they won't turn your skin completely white.

StillDirrty said:

I think you mean pale, lol. MJ always used makeup to even out his skin tones. I think he was still doing that until his death.

Timmy84 said:

Hey Timmy!!!! I love MJ's big nose BTW!!!

dag said:

i agree completely . you'll probably get a kick out of this

If you look at pictures from the last dates of the Victory Tour, he was packing on the makeup on his face, neck and hands

I think you mean pale, lol. MJ always used makeup to even out his skin tones. I think he was still doing that until his death.