African Americans and other ethnic groups possessing dark skin, have some skin care challenges with uneven skin tone. Many black skin care products identify these challenges and aim their effect at evening out the troubled skin tone. Having an even-out skin tone feature in a black skin care product is a big selling point.

Skin tone comes from melanin, the skin pigment that colors your skin. Light-skinned people can have uneven skin tone due to uneven distribution of melanin under their skin. If the melanin is concentrated you have freckles. Sunshine starts the production of melanin and this can darken your skin color all together.

As well, black skin is not very elastic and this means that it can scar very easily and be irritated more easily than lighter, more elastic skin. The low elasticity is influenced by the high pigmentation, which simply makes the skin thicker. What happens is that scarring or irritation can produce hyper-pigmentation or darkened skin. Irritation sometimes activates the production of melanin and this produces dark patches on the skin where the irritation occurred. Even the irritation caused by shaving can darken the skin.

If you use the kind of black skin care product that mitigates the assaults that your skin has to cope with, you can prevent a lot of the causes of irregular skin color. There are a number of excellent African American skin care products that are especially made to oil, protect, and repair black skin. For instance, look for creams that have tretinoin because this is very good for helping prevent or overcome hyper-pigmentation.

Tretinoin comes from vitamin A. It works as a regulator substance in and helps with the growth and development of bone and helps in the maintenance of epithelium. (This is the technical way it is described - but all this says that this substance comes from vitamin A and is good for your skin and bones.) If it is used in a face cream that you put on your skin, it treats acne, fine wrinkles, hyper pigmentation, and skin roughness.

The best thing you can do for your skin is ensure that you choose products that are produced specifically for black skin. For African American skin care, look for tretinoin in face creams and products with heavy oil that can penetrate deeply so that it hydrates without leaving the skin oily. It is also an excellent idea to put on sunscreen because this helps with irregular or hyper pigmentation. On the other hand, black skin care products for your body often have to cope with a totally different problem and that is dry skin that can get a kind of ashy look.