Vitiligo

When you look at Michael Jackson from the 90s onward you see that his skin is different from the beautiful brown tone he sported as a child, but now is pale and without any color at all. We’ve been told by Michael and others that this is as a result of his skin disorder vitiligo, but for whatever reason the media has always spread about doubt and questioning of this explanation. Instead people opt for the idea that Michael had bleached his skin because of the desire to become white and/or to gain a wider audience of Caucasians; both excuses I’ve always found to be completely ridiculous. Admittedly, even today it’s not a very widely known disease, and even people who have heard of it don’t know much about it.

Vitiligo is an autoimmune disease in which melanocytes (cells that grow pigment) are destroyed, and as a result patches of depigmented skin appear in places on the body. It affects .5 to 1 percent [65 million; 1 to 2 million in America] of the world’s population and anyone is susceptible to it regardless of race. While the causes are not completely known, it can be hereditary, so children that have parents or family members with the disorder are more likely to have the disease. In Michael’s case it was Michael’s great aunt; on Joseph’s side of the family.

I’m no specialist on the disease, but I’ve always wondered if Michael having terrible acne worked as sort of a precursor to the disease. He already had developed a few blotches on his hands by the time he was twelve, but it appeared to have stalled until his mid to late teens. Half the population of people with vitiligo will develop it before the age of 20, and most will have it before they enter their 40s. Michael says that his skin began to really change “around Off the Wall/Thriller, sometime around then”. Just before Off the Wall, Michael had been filming the Wiz which required him to sit through 5-hour make-up sessions, 6 days a week which he says he enjoyed. However, in both his, his mother’s and Diana Ross’ autobiographies, they mention that taking it off was an awful process. In Katharine’s autobiography she says how kids outside the set had seen him leaving one day and because his skin looked so raw and red they’d yelled out, “That guys on drugs!” I doubt if all the make-up and the constant chemical removals did anything to deter his disorder. Not to mention, all of the many different treatments that he was trying to get rid of his acne.

There are three different types of vitiligo:

• GENERALIZED
  This is the most common. Generalized vitiligo often first appears on the hands, fingertips, wrists, around the eyes or mouth, or on the feet. It often begins with a rapid loss of skin color. Cycles of pigment loss, followed by times when the pigment does not change, may continue indefinitely over a person’s life. Generalized vitiligo commonly spreads to the face, lips, hands, arms, legs, or genitals. This type also may be called bilateral vitiligo because it causes loss of skin color on both sides of the body.
• SEGMENTAL
  This type tends to begin at an early age, progress for a year or two, and then stop. It is called segmental because color loss tends to be confined to one segment of the body. A segment of hair on the head, an eyelash, or an eyebrow may turn white, almost always on just one side of the body. Segmental vitiligo also may be called unilateral vitiligo because when it develops on the face, arm, trunk, or leg, it occurs on one side of the body.
• TRICHROME VITILIGO
  Three shades of color — brown, tan, and white — develop on the skin.

It’s safe to say that Michael was suffering from generalized vitiligo as his skin grew progressively lighter over the years. The rapid loss of skin pigment had already begun by  the time the 80s rolled around.

Shortly, after Thriller was released a few articles made comments on how his skin appeared lighter and how he was now wearing make-up. It didn’t matter then because at that moment in time everybody loved Michael Jackson, no matter how he looked; he was the biggest superstar in the world with the best dance steps you’d ever seen. Still, if you look closely enough, in a lot of those photos you’re able to see just barely through his make-up that areas on his skin look lighter than others.

We all remember that famous one glove whose claim to fame was on Michael’s left hand on Motown 25, but did you ever wonder why he came up with that?

I don’t doubt that Michael wore as a part of his attention grabbing style, but it served more purpose than a fashion statement. According to his dermatologist, Michael’s hands were where the disease was most severe by the time he was diagnosed, which was around Thriller. Even before Motown 25 he had been wearing the one glove for years, you can see it easily on the 1981 Triumph Tour with his brothers.

I never liked the glove, although when I saw his monstrous hand, I got it. And I admired what he’d done to cover it up. It was never clear to me if that hurt or not, but I imagine it did. Think about the beauty of that. Putting sequins on your open wounds. Think about the entire world staring at the one thing that makes you feel most ugly.

— Tom Chiarella

All of a sudden, he [the designer] said, ‘I’m doing this glove for Michael’. Michael was beginning to develop the vitiligo and it started on his hand. The glove was to cover the vitiligo; that’s how that glove came into being.” The glove design and reason for it were not just hearsay for Tyson, she said. “I was there when he was creating it.”

-Cicely Tyson

The one glove was an easier way to conceal the disease than trying to properly apply make-up to your hands, and even if he did apply make-up it could easily be rubbed off – not to say that he never did (as you can see above), I’d just imagine that it lessened his worries some over missing a spot. The biggest superstar in the world had a lot of hands to shake.

I’ve always wondered about the sunglasses too. He’s always worn them, I know as a way to conceal a part of himself from the public; they say the eyes are the window to the soul, and he was never comfortable with that sort of vulnerability. The eyes are one of the places that vitiligo will start and while applying make-up to them works, sunglasses do give that extra sense of security. Sometimes you can see the area around his eyes appears to be a bit lighter than the rest of his face, like in this video:

From the year 1986 when Michael showed up at the Grammys and AMAs to collect accolades for We Are the World, it became clear to the public that something was going on with his skin. This also around the time that the media decided it was open season to Michael Jackson. His skin now varied between a dark tan and light beige by make-up which you could at times see through as seen with some pictures above and below, including the one with Liza Minnelli. People can say that he was bleaching his skin, but that wouldn’t explain the many photos he looked darker than he did in a previous photo and vice versa.

  

At :3-:6 seconds and :9-11 seconds; his right uper arm and right arm and wrist:

Below, you can see that he was unable to put make-up on the skin beneath his hair:

By the 90s, Michael’s skin was more than 50% depigmented, and he could no longer conceal the issue any longer. After the Oprah special aired a magazine article questioned why he didn’t use dark make-up to even out his skin instead of light make-up - well, like you now know, he’d done that for over a decade. The transition was necessary to be made with his skin, already we’d been able to see that his complexion looked odd because his pallor was showing through the make-up as seen in some of the above Thriller Era photos.

In finally letting his skin “come out of the closet”, we didn’t see pale blotches anymore, rather brown freckles in areas of his skin.

At 2:23 she mentions those freckles:

A spider bite:

In bleaching his skin, would those freckles still be on his skin? 1) If you bleach your skin, your skin is lightened evenly as it is applied, and if he had done this then the little spots would be the same as skin around them; blended in. 2) If Michael desired to be white, why did he not stop bleaching once he’d reached the flesh colour of your average Caucasian; why keep bleaching until you resemble the colour of an albino? 3) While it is possible for a black person to bleach their skin, it is impossible to achieve the colour that Michael became; through bleaching, a black person can only lighten their skin, not eliminate their pigment completely.

Here’s TONS more revealing photos:

http://rhythmofthetide.com/2011/michael-jackson-vitiligo-timeline/

TREATMENT

Skin color occasionally returns without treatment. Other people lose all of their pigment, causing the skin to become a white color. When the latter happens and the person no longer has patches of contrasting skin color, the person still has vitiligo. Most cases of vitiligo fall between these two extremes and can be successfully treated. Treatment options include:

LIGHT THERAPY AND MEDICATIONS
When avoiding a tan and camouflaging do not produce satisfactory results, a dermatologist may recommend medical treatment. The goal of medical treatment is to create a uniform skin tone by either restoring color (repigment) or eliminating the remaining color (depigment). The type of treatment selected depends on the type of vitiligo, severity, as well as the patient’s preference, health, and age. Medical treatment for vitiligo includes:

• Narrow Band Ultraviolet B (NB-UVB). This therapy uses light to repigment the skin. NB-UVB requires two to three treatment sessions per week for several months. A standard phototherapy unit may be used to treat the patient. NB-UVB treatments are available in some doctor’s offices, as well as from home units, if prescribed. Another source of NB-UVB is excimer lasers. These lasers tend to produce the best results on the face. The hands and feet seem least responsive. Laser treatment can be very expensive and time-consuming.

• PUVA. This therapy uses Ultraviolet A (UVA) light and a medication called psoralen to repigment the skin. The psoralen may be applied to the skin or taken as a pill. Psoralen, which is the “P” in PUVA, makes the skin very sensitive to light. This treatment is 50 percent to 75 percent effective in returning color to the skin on the face, trunk, upper arms, and upper legs. The hands and feet tend to respond poorly. PUVA is time-consuming. It requires at least one year of treatments given twice weekly. PUVA treatments should be given under a dermatologist’s close supervision.
• Creams and ointments. Medications that are applied to the skin such as topical corticosteroids, tacrolimus, and calcipotriol can be used to repigment small areas. Topical corticosteroids tend to be more effective in people with darkly pigmented skin and often are most effective on the face. They also can add pigment to the neck, arms, and legs. To achieve faster results, a topical corticosteroid may be combined with calcipotriol. Tacrolimus often works best when combined with NB-UVB light. Patients who use creams and ointments must be carefully monitored.
• Surgery. Surgical treatment involves transferring skin that has not been affected by vitiligo to patches where vitiligo occurs. Also called a skin graft, this treatment option tends to be most suitable for people who have segmental vitiligo and can produce excellent results. Grafting is only available in certain areas of the United States.

From another website:

Depigmentation. This treatment involves fading the rest of the skin on the body to match the areas that are already white. For people who have vitiligo on more than 50 percent of their bodies, depigmentation may be the best treatment option. Patients apply the drug monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone (monobenzone) twice a day to pigmented areas until they match the already-depigmented areas. You must avoid direct skin-to-skin contact with other people for at least 2 hours after applying the drug, as transfer of the drug may cause depigmentation of the other person’s skin. The major side effect of depigmentation therapy is inflammation (redness and swelling) of the skin. You may experience itching or dry skin. Depigmentation tends to be permanent and is not easily reversed. In addition, a person who undergoes depigmentation will always be unusually sensitive to sunlight.

In the case of most of these treatments results vary, can have side-effects, and at times are not long-lasting; people recommended for these treatments are those that do not have extensive vitiligo. Over 50% of Michael’s skin was affected, and in the end to achieve a uniform colour full depigmentation was necessary. More so, no matter what treatment he chose, he was taking medication for another skin disorder that he had called discoid lupus; the medication held an ingredient that increased depigmentation. Lupus is a more deadly disease, and so treatment would, of course, be given priority over vitiligo.

Side effects of the treatments for depigmentation could be seen in pictures above where his chest is exposed. His skin is red-ish looking, as though inflamed, partly due to exertion and symptoms of lupus.

And this is from his autopsy report which clearly lists vitligo in its observations. It can be found in full here:

Michael suffered more in life than he should’ve, and it’s bad enough that the world had to add to the psychological pain patients suffer through this disorder. He had to watch himself change from one colour to another throughout most of his life; the fact that he only mentioned it when necessary, and rarely after that, should be enough to show that it was a private thing.

How many of you enjoy your biggest insecurities picked apart and speculated by the world?

VIDEOS

Photos showing his vitiligo

More Photos showing his vitiligo

Try to ignore the three idiots, I don’t know why Geraldo chose those three to be on here, considering he’s a fair person. As for the clip of LaToya, she’s known of the disease, but was under the control of her husband:

Geraldo on Mj’s vitiligo (start from 2:50)

Geraldo Part 3

Geraldo Part 4

Geraldo Part 5

Tagged: autoimmune disease, disorder, Human skin color, king of pop, michael jackson, skin, skin disease, skin disorder, vitligo

Posted in: Skin Deep, Uncategorized