Although heredity and lifestyle are crucial for skin aging, skin color also affects when the first wrinkles appear.
Light skin ages earlier than dark skin, and the reason lies mainly in the pigment melanin.
Melanin is involved in giving the skin its color. People with light skin produce a limited amount of melanin, while those with darker skin produce more. There is also another thicker and darker type of melanin, called eumelanin . Melanin protects the skin by absorbing the sun’s rays and converting the radiation into harmless heat.
The level of melanin in the skin actually corresponds to the different strengths of sun protection in sunscreens. The dark skin of people of African descent generally provides similar protection to sunscreen with a protection factor of 13. In comparison, white Europeans are only protected by a factor of up to three.
Melanin is actually the skin’s sunscreen
Production
Melanin is produced by cells called melanocytes in response to sunlight.
Effects
Melanin converts 99.9% of the sun’s ultraviolet radiation into harmless heat.
Dark skin is also better protected against skin cancer than light skin, and it should be noted that skin cancer is ten times more common among whites than blacks.
Cell biologist Mel Greaves conducted a study in 2014 that revealed that Caucasians (albinos) in African countries suffer from skin cancer many times more often than their darker-skinned counterparts. As a result, Mel Greaves concluded that skin cancer influenced the evolution that led to the development of dark skin.
The hypothesis is that when man began to lose his body hair about two million years ago, the genes of people with darker skin spread at the expense of those that resulted in lighter skin.
