the.com/depigmentation
When skin or hair gives up making color and just quietly ghosts you.
means The partial or total loss of pigment in skin, hair, or other tissue, usually because the cells that make melanin stop working or are destroyed.
from Built from the Latin prefix 'de-' (undoing or removal) plus 'pigmentum', meaning paint or coloring matter, the same root that gives us 'pigment'. 'Pigmentum' itself traces back to 'pingere', to paint — the same ancestor behind 'picture' and 'paint'. So depigmentation is literally 'the un-painting', a 19th/20th-century scientific coinage built for a condition medicine needed a precise word for.
- main culprit
- melanocytes stop producing melanin entirely
- common cause
- vitiligo, an autoimmune attack on pigment cells
- not contagious
- despite what grade school rumors claimed
- famous case
- Michael Jackson publicly attributed his to vitiligo