During this blog I’d like to have a discussion about normal moles and melanomas and distinguishing the difference between the two. As we are coming into the summer months and we all want to get out into the sun, it’s really important that we protect our skin with sunscreen, it needs to be an adequate balance of exposure to the sun and getting an adequate dose of vitamin D for the day and then UV rays causing sun damage.

Firstly, I will discuss normal moles and freckles and how we can distinguish the difference, normal moles appear in the first few decades of life, in almost everyone and are very common small brown spots or growths on the skin, they appear very flat, however, some can be a little bit elevated and are usually round and regular in shape, in many cases, they are caused by sun exposure, there are different names for them all, freckles and age spots are flat, they occur with sun exposure and multiple spots characteristically occur together. Age spots can be light or dark they can be brown or black, they are uniform in colour, all one colour, age spots are harmless and could be treated by several methods for cosmetic reasons, but do not necessarily need to be treated. Some changes occur to your skin automatically with age, such as age spots, these are also called liver spots, but they have nothing medical to do with the liver, they are caused by long term sun exposure.

There are three common types of age spots, some that we see are little red dots and these are called cherry hemangiomas, small red dots that are smaller than a pencil eraser, that are caused by an overgrowth of blood vessels in the skin, but they’re not linked to any kind of skin cancer, lentigines are flat, they are dark in colour, this is the next kind of very common age spot, their size is usually up to a 5p coin and what most people think of with these age spots, is they are located on sun exposed areas. Seborrhoeic keratosis is the third type, it’s flat or it can be a little bit raised and range from pale to dark brown, they can be scaly or wart like in appearance, although they’re not warts, caused by sunlight or genetic exposure, they can be linked to skin tags, another benign skin growths, as a general rule, if you see a new skin spot and you are concerned about it get it checked out. Some changes with the skin come with age, though if you are over 50 or have a personal or family history of skin cancer, you should just go and have a check up.

Melanoma is the only form of cancer that we can see on the skin and as it shows up quickly, we have the advantage to catch it in the early stages, because we can see it, with faster recovery rates and less spreading, so early detection can save lives, check your spots. Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer and it can look like a mole or originate from a mole, it can originate from just plain flat skin, most are caused by sun exposure or sunbeds. Sunbeds are more toxic to the body and harmful, as they directly impact UV rays straight into the layers of skin that a melanoma needs to develop. Malignant melanomas develop after UV exposure when unrepaired DNA damages the skin cells, the damaged skin cells trigger mutations, that cause cells to rapidly multiply and cause malignant tumours.

A melanoma in its early stage, can resemble a lentigines or sometimes seborrheic keratosis, however they grow from here. A melanoma is just cancer that starts on the skin, it can start in a mole or normal looking skin, melanoma develops from cells called melanocytes, that grow and divide more quickly than usual. Melanocytes control your pigmentation, the even or uneven skin tones.

A melanoma in men is most commonly seen on the back, and you don’t always look at your own back, so it’s always great to get somebody else in your family to have a look at your skin, if you have any risk factors. In women, they most commonly occur on the legs, most cases of melanoma become irregular in shape, and they develop more than one colour in the mole, it may become itchy and larger than normal, sometimes it can begin to bleed, but they don’t always have to have these specific traits.

There are a few different types of melanoma, one of the most common types is a superficial spreading melanoma in the UK, more common with people of pale skin and freckles, they grow outwards first rather than downwards, this is really important, if they are caught in the early stages they are very easily treated, if they grow downwards into the deeper layers of the skin they can spread into other parts of the body, early detection is paramount!

Nodular melanomas are the next type, faster developing, can quickly grow downwards and if not removed they can spread into other areas of the body. They are often red or black in colour and develop on the head, chest, neck, back, areas that have normal consistency in skin colour but are most exposed to the sun.

Lentigo melanomas most commonly effect older people and sun seekers or people who have had outdoor professions, who are exposed to the sun and UV light day in and day out, they develop over several years and they are flat and develop sideways, they gradually get bigger and change shape.

Acral lentiginous melanomas are a really rare type that develop or grow on the palms of the hands or the soles of the feet, they can develop around a nail or a toenail and most common in people with dark skin.

Melanomas are caused by skin cells that begin to develop abnormally, they are caused by exposure to UV light or sunbed exposure, intense exposure to UV light with an increased risk of melanomas, if you have lots of moles of freckles, if you have pale skin that easily burns, blue eyes, increasing age, red or blonde hair or a family history of melanoma, this is really important, if you’ve got a family history of skin cancer, get those moles checked. If you have previously damaged skin through radiation or chemotherapy, anything that suppresses your immune system, conditions that suppress your immune system, like diabetes or if you’re on medications that suppress your immune system, you’re also at greater risk, and greater exposure.

UVA, UVB and UVC is the most common and dangerous to the skin, but it is filtered by the earth’s atmosphere, so we must protect ourselves from the sun with a good broad-spectrum sunscreen, this is the best thing that you can do to suppress the threat of melanoma. If you find a spot there is treatment available you need to go to the GP and be referred to a dermatologist, who is a skin care specialist, they can have a look under a special magnifying glass to fully examine that spot, getting it checked out is the best thing that you can do, early detection, saves lives.

The ABCDE of melanoma is a good referral tool.
A stands for asymmetrical features when one half of the mole does not match the other half.
B stands for borders, the borders are not smooth or regular, you’re looking for an asymmetrical mole, one side doesn’t match the other and it has irregular borders.
C is for colour, the colour, varies throughout the mole and there is no uniform colour or uniformity of pigmentation, it varies in colour from light to dark, the colour changes in the mole.
D for diameter, it can be greater than 6 mm.
E for evolving changes in the mole, they are variable over time, if it is changing then get it checked out. If you’re unsure at all then get that mole checked.

Normal moles are exactly the opposite of melanoma, normal moles appear in the first few decades of life, in almost everyone and are common small brown spots or growths on the skin. They appear either flat or a little bit elevated, usually round and regular and many are caused by sun exposure and later in life.

The average adult has about 10 to 20 spots or growths, generally normal moles are the opposite, their shape is symmetrical, one side matches the other side in shape, they are round or oval, the border has regular edges that are sharp and well-defined, the colour is uniform it’s all one colour right throughout the mole, either usually tan, brown or skin colour, the diameter is less than 6 mm, normal moles usually resemble one another and often concentrated on sun-exposed areas, such as the face, trunk, arms and legs, although they can be located anywhere on the body.

Moles usually either develop during childhood or by the age of 30 to 40, if your moles are changing and colour, shape or uniformity is changing, or they are evolving, getting bigger in size, then get that mole checked. Look at its colour, look at its shape, is it changing? New moles, old moles, the best you can do is monitor your moles, to protect yourself from melanoma, get those moles checked out.

I hope this has helped a little bit. I’m just distinguishing freckles from melanoma, as it’s a really quick easy way we can check our bodies to save lives, so if you have someone in your family that you’re worried about, or they’ve got a spot, really encourage them to seek a professional opinion.

If you want to come and have a chat with me my number is 07444938248 and I can refer you to a skincare specialist or you can go to your GP and they can refer you to a skincare specialist.

Get those moles checked and protect yourself from melanoma.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Amanda Azzopardi, an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Aesthetic Medicine Prescriber, specialises in ageing-related changes. With a Masters in Advanced Clinical Practice, she's trained at the renowned Harley Academy in London and the Level 7 accredited Derma Medical Academy. Boasting over 15 years of global experience in acute medical settings and extensive aesthetic insurance, Amanda combines care, skill, and professionalism to ensure your treatments are in trustworthy hands.

For a lot of us, face wipes are in the bathroom, they’re essential, they’re convenient, they’re cheap. They’re a quick means of removing the grime off our faces or our makeup.

The sales of face wipes have really escalated in the last few years, and our skin is not happy about it.

They are bad for the environment, and over 50% wash up on British beaches. Over 35 kilometers of wipes have washed up on English beaches, littering the coastline as people throw them down the toilet straight after they’re finished.

In this mixture we’ve got antibacterial wipes, self-tanning wipes, baby wipes and cleaning wipes, all of these are going down the toilet into our beaches.

So do we really want to be swimming with this in the summer? It’s a worsening serious ecological problem, but it’s also a problem for our skin.

The face wipes or baby wipes don’t disintegrate like toilet paper, as they’re partially plastic and the polyesters can take over 100 years to break down, this also presents a harmful factor for all of our wildlife.

Cleansing wipes contain drying alcohol, which rapidly ages your skin. Huge amounts of chemical components to keep them moist effective and preserved in their plastic containers. To dissolve lift and remove all the makeup off your skin and to remove the dead skin cells. Without rinsing these chemicals off, you are subjecting yourself to leaving grime and residue on your skin. This subjects your skin to an array of irritating chemicals that will sit on your skin and be absorbed into your bloodstream, as you sleep overnight.

When you use a face wipe, it’s easy to get into the habit of rubbing the eye area vigorously to remove stubborn eye makeup. The skin around the eye is extremely delicate and the rubbing motion alone will drag the skin and cause premature ageing, without even considering the potential ingredients. As well as irritation the high levels of alcohol and preservatives can cause extreme dryness, crepey skin, fine lines and really accelerate premature ageing.

Around your eyes, you need to be using products that are gentle, to stimulate circulation, to reduce fine lines, puffiness and dark circles. If you’re prone to spots and acne, you may feel you have excess oil production, and the face wipes are drying your spots out and this will improve your acne. However, it does exactly the opposite, drying out your skin won’t improve your acne, it will make it worse, as your skin will make more oil and the sebaceous oil glands will become over productive to compensate.

We need to be feeding our skin with friendly ingredients such as rosehip, black willow bark, or green tea. Makeup wipes just smear the makeup around our face with the bacteria from the dead skin cells causing irritation, due to the excessive preservatives, that prevent the microorganisms in the actual wipes from contaminating the other wipes.

Makeup wipes really encourage lazy cleansing. Most people think if they remove their makeup, they have cleansed their skin sufficiently, and then they proceed to the next steps of their skincare regime, made worse by this quick, easy, convenient waterless cleansing.

Smearing our makeup and all the bacteria, all over our face, and then applying our nightly serums and moisturisers, actually just infuses the bacteria into the deeper layers and the toxins are absorbed by our body into our bloodstream. As we sleep, the dirt its trapped in and clogs the pores, which are not able to close and harsh abrasive wipes, can cause over-exfoliation of our skin.
This all causes redness, irritation, sensitivity, flakiness, dull skin and breakups. We follow all this with an acid-based toner which irritates the skin, even further. Yet, I see this happening so often, because people don’t realise the stress that they are placing their skin under.

Life is already stressful. Let’s not stress out our skin any further.

If you have any questions about skincare or correct skin cleansing routines, then please give me a call or message me.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Amanda Azzopardi, an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Aesthetic Medicine Prescriber, specialises in ageing-related changes. With a Masters in Advanced Clinical Practice, she's trained at the renowned Harley Academy in London and the Level 7 accredited Derma Medical Academy. Boasting over 15 years of global experience in acute medical settings and extensive aesthetic insurance, Amanda combines care, skill, and professionalism to ensure your treatments are in trustworthy hands.

The most important thing about Vitamin C is that it’s safe to use on ALL skin types. It is really hydrating, so it decreases the transepidermal water loss, meaning it stops water from coming out of your skin, allowing your skin to retain more moisture, keeping it plump and hydrated.

Vitamin C has a brightening effect, it fades pigmentation, and it smooths the skin surface. It gets rid of all the dullness and leaves you with a really beautiful glow. Vitamin C is great for sensitive skin, reducing redness. With more complex problems, it really helps inflammatory skin conditions.

It helps fade, uneven skin tone or hyperpigmentation, such as sunspots and age spots and overproduction of melanin in areas where acne has healed and you have the little brown spots around it.

Vitamin C is amazing for treating under eye circles. It really pumps and hydrates under the eye area, to improve the tone and texture and quality of the skin. It prevents the skin from sagging, and it really boosts your collagen production. It also protects from sun damage caused by molecules called free radicals.

Free radicals are atoms that are missing an electron, free radicals search for atoms to steal an electron from leading to significant damage to the skin cells, but Vitamin C is rich in antioxidants and antioxidants protect healthy skin cells, by giving these free radicals, an electron and rendering them harmless.

Vitamin C is an amazing antioxidant and it can neutralise these free radicals, which are destructive molecules, and they go around and land on your skin, destroying your collagen levels. Free radicals are caused by things that you’re exposed to every single day, like the sun smoke, pollution, and most of all stress. Stress has a huge impact on your skin health, so you can’t avoid free radicals, however, you can protect your skin against them with some Vitamin C. The next thing that Vitamin C is great for is soothing sunburn, minimising redness and accelerating your cellular turnover. It replaces those damaged skin cells with healthy ones.

So, now here’s the question, how do you choose the best Vitamin C for your skin? There are so many different forms of Vitamin C on the market, do you choose one with nice packaging? The one that causes less irritation? or is it a medical-grade skincare product with research behind it, proving that it can penetrate into the deeper layers of your skin to stimulate a response and improvement in your skin. Your all going to know which one I’m going to pick, it’s the scientifically backed medical-grade skincare, so I like to approach everything from a scientific perspective, to ensure the product I am recommending will actually achieve results for your specific skin type.

I recommend from a fully informed position, backed by scientific research with all the benefits that we’re about to discuss. So, which one do you choose? There are so many different strengths on the market and the different terminology is very overwhelming. There are a lot of terms used to describe the different products, which can all become very confusing, but I’m going to try and break these down for you. L- ascorbic acid is the most abundant Vitamin C in our body, and it’s the most abundant antioxidant, but the levels reduced with age, so we need to replace this topically. As I previously mentioned taking Vitamin C taking tablets, just doesn’t get from your digestive tract to your skin, therefore topical application is the best way.

So, this is easy, right, all you have to do is look for a product with L- ascorbic acid in it right? No wrong, so what we have to do? There are lots of different types of l- ascorbic acid, and there are different things that Vitamin C is called, different names like sodium ascorbyl phosphate, ascorbyl palmitate, tetrahexldecyl ascorbate. They’re also confusing and I can’t pronounce most of them, but basically what you’re looking for is l-ascorbic acid or ascorbic acid. The rest have had molecule added to them, or ester to preserve their shelf life.

Vitamin C is water-soluble and formulation is everything when choosing your Vitamin C. When Vitamin C starts to break down and become ineffective it will oxidise. It’ll oxidise more if it’s exposed to light or air or sun. So, basically, all these other products have an ester added to them meaning, they’ve taken l-ascorbic acid and added the molecule to it, then when you apply it to your skin, your skin has to revert the ester back to L ascorbic acid, so it can be absorbed, but there’s a reason they’ve added these additives so that the product can have a longer shelf life, and the product is stabilised in a container, so it lasts longer, but there’s no evidence to show, then when it’s reverted back, how much is actually absorbed into your skin. So, what’re the best products to choose from? When you’re looking for a Vitamin C it’s plain l-ascorbic acid without the esters.

Let’s discuss a couple of other things that you really have to be looking for it. The l-ascorbic acid is fresh and can be mixed by you, then there is no oxidisation. There are no preservatives and there are no esters. Basically, you’re looking for an airtight container, and you need it to be dark glass, so it’s protected from the sunlight and preferably you have to be able to mix your Vitamin C peptides with your serum, then you know it’s fresh, and you’re getting maximum use out of it, it’s not oxidised at all. The minute it is mixed with your serum, it starts to dissolve and it starts to oxidise or reduce in efficacy, and it becomes less and less effective.

The normal pH of your skin is 4.7 to 5.7. This is next part of the formulation, the other thing you’re looking for in a Vitamin C is the pH. The pH of water is neutral, anything above neutral is acidic, everything below is alkaline, so the skin is naturally slightly acidic, your Vitamin C needs a pH less than that of skin, so it needs to be about 2.5 to 3.5. When you’re looking for a Vitamin C formulation, formulation really is everything. The concentration is the first thing that you’re looking for and it has to be between 8% and 20%, you can spend so much money on beauty, skincare, cosmetic creams and serums to put on your face, but you really need to be looking at what’s in the ingredients.

Between 8 to 20% with the concentration is the sweet spot, below 8 is too low to achieve results, above 20 can be very irritating to your skin 2.5 to 3.5 pH. Have a look on the bottle the ascorbic acid will last a couple of months for you, that will be great for your skin. So, the lower the pH, the more irritating on the skin and you will need to get that right balance. Other antioxidants that work synergistically with L ascorbic acid is Vitamin E and Ferulic acid. These are really important helper anti-oxidants to have in your Vitamin C serum, as they double the body’s ability to absorb the Vitamin C, which provides stability and boosts the effectiveness.

Your dark glass container housing will decrease your oxidisation, and you really need to have your helping antioxidants in there with it so Vitamin C, Vitamin E Ferulic acid, and I’m going to tell you about another one in a minute. In a water-based Vitamin C, the things that you would be looking out for are:

1. What form of Vitamin C is it?
2. What is the pH and is it between 2.5 and 3.5?
3. What is the concentration? is it between 8% and 20%.
4. Does it have the synergistic antioxidants in it, to give you the best boost you can achieve with your skin.
5. Is it crystal clear? when you’re having a look at the bottle, not yellow, not starting to oxidise or going a dark rust colour or brown, not usable. It’s only 20% effective if you find it and it’s gone this colour.

I have tried a few different Vitamin C’s out over the last six months, and my favourite one of all time is Everactive C and E from AlumierMD, which I use every day. It’s the best Vitamin C for your ageing skin. It’s a water based solution. Its a potent antioxidant serum to reduce the visible signs of ageing. It’s got a really unique delivery system and it’s 15% vitamin C, it’s got your Vitamin E in it. It brightens and revitalises the look of the skin and reduces the fine lines, improves that skin tone and texture and it’s got all those helper antioxidants in it to neutralise free radicals from the sun. It comes in a little container which you press a release button, and all the powder is released from a chamber at the top, and the Vitamin C crystal peptides go into the serum, so you know it’s fresh, it’s also mixed with the Matrxyl synthe 6, which is a really powerful peptide with six skin rebuilding essentials. The six ingredients, stimulate the skin’s dermal-epidermal junction to firm, plump, and repair it can double the amount of collagen that our skin produces.

The next thing is there are a few different ways Vitamin C can be stored, one is water-soluble, you can have it in a silicon base or an oil base, so it won’t dissolve on the shelf, and then this waterless solution dissolves when you put it onto your skin. It becomes hydrated and activated, so it should be released from the silicone, but I’m just not sure how much Vitamin C can get through the silicone to get into your skin, therefore, I do prefer a water-based Vitamin C. The third way of applying Vitamin C is to get it in powder form, so you mix it up as you go.

You don’t need to worry about the pH of it, because it’s already stabilised, it’s a powder but still check your concentration, make sure It’s 8-20%, and I still like to see that it’s got the helper antioxidants in there, to really get that penetration down to the cellular level, it doesn’t need to be in a dark container with an airless pump, so it won’t oxidise in that way.

If you have any questions about Vitamin C, and you’re still unsure, whether you should be using it in your daily skincare routine, I guarantee you should be!! If you’d like to have a chat to me. Just give me a call on 07444938248, or give me a text and check out the rest of my website.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Amanda Azzopardi, an Advanced Nurse Practitioner and Aesthetic Medicine Prescriber, specialises in ageing-related changes. With a Masters in Advanced Clinical Practice, she's trained at the renowned Harley Academy in London and the Level 7 accredited Derma Medical Academy. Boasting over 15 years of global experience in acute medical settings and extensive aesthetic insurance, Amanda combines care, skill, and professionalism to ensure your treatments are in trustworthy hands.