Our skin has a vitiligo memory

Last Updated on 11th December 2023 by Caroline Haye

But new treatment could make it forget to create white patches

Recent findings have revealed that our skin has a vitiligo “memory”. This explains why patches often return in exactly the same places some time after successful treatments end. It is because of so-called “skin memory cells”. This discovery is fascinating. But, more importantly, it could offer an ingenious way of preventing de-pigmentation by forcing the skin to “forget”.

I wondered how the white patches knew where to appear

For decades the relentless spread of vitiligo over my face and body filled me with a mixture of dread and fascination. (It eventually took away roughly 80% of my natural skin colour). If I’m honest, there was more dread than fascination. But, in my more objective moments, I do remember being curious about the way new patches developed. How on earth did my body “decide” where each new white spot would appear? What shape and size it would be? And how did it replicate the same pattern on both sides of me so as to produce a kind of mirror image? This effect even created a bizarre impression in my mind… An impression of vitiligo as being, not so much a disease process, as a design process.

It was as if a self-generating form of body art was gradually engulfing me! I was intrigued by how my skin “knew” what to do next. And by how it managed to maintain each new design that it created on my body. I knew that skin cells are in a constant state of reproduction and replacement. So how could the same type of cells that had reproduced my normal flesh colour for decades suddenly switch to reproducing a pure white version of themselves? And how they could accomplish this with almost perfect symmetry?

Have vitiligo patches lost their memory… or is it actually the opposite?

Later, a combination of nutritional supplementation and sun exposure actually reversed my vitiligo. And, at that point, my feelings changed to surprise, elation and utter relief. (To the point of waxing poetical!). But my sense of fascination was, if anything, even greater than before. Now I started to wonder how it had happened. How had the same areas that had been producing, and reproducing, pure white cells reverted to creating coloured ones again?

Many of these areas had not produced pigment for 20, 30, 40 years or more. And yet all these decades later they began to behave normally again for no apparent reason. (The only possible reason was that I was feeding my body high levels of certain nutrients.) It was as if they had been suffering from a seemingly permanent state of amnesia… Only to finally, and miraculously, recover their memory. Or was this process actually the other way round?  Was it the vitiligo patches that were doing the remembering? See what I mean? Fascinating.

The scientific verdict on skin memory

Research teams at four separate laboratories (including a team led by Dr John Harris) have been studying this phenomenon. They concluded that skin actually creates a “memory” of the locations of new vitiligo patches when they are first formed. Meaning that it “knows” where to recreate them in the event that a re-pigmentation treatment produces only temporary results.

This kind of short-lived success is apparently quite common in cases where purely topical therapies end after a certain period of time. Treatments that don’t address the internal mechanisms behind vitiligo appear to end in eventual relapse. And in exactly the same places and shapes as before.

I remember experiencing this myself (before my eventual recovery). On the odd occasion when a vitiligo patch would regain some pigment during the summer, it re-surfaced in exactly the same configuration in the winter.  Since then, I have been very fortunate in that I have not experienced any such relapses in my re-pigmentation. But I attribute this permanent recovery to the fact I used an internal, nutritional, approach which I have continued to follow ever since. And whenever I have used a topical therapy – such as UV exposure and, if and when needed, the antioxidant-rich gel Vitix – it has been in addition to nutritional supplementation, not instead of it.

Relevance for a vitiligo cure

The research teams investigating these “memory cells” in the skin have discovered that they are the reason our immune system attacks our pigment-producing cells in the seemingly bizarre way that it does. Their real job is to protect the skin from all future recurrences of harmful viral infections but, in vitiligo, they mistakenly identify the skin’s own pigment-producing cells for such infections and attack them.

Scientists have known for a while that cells possess something akin to memory. But, as far as I can tell, this knowledge in relation to vitiligo is something quite new. Evidence that an inappropriate immune response lies behind autoimmune vitiligo (and a whole range of other conditions too) is not news. But, until now, no one had figured out that, once cells have been affected by vitiligo, they retain an in-built ability to “remember and file away for future reference” their initial reaction. And so they repeat the same immune response in exactly the same locations again and again. Unless, of course, medicine finds some way to prevent them from doing so. Which is, as I understand it, the aim of this research. Finding a way to make these cells “forget” to fight our melanocytes would be one way to cure vitiligo.

This possibility is one of many currently under investigation and is a reminder that we are living in very hopeful times. Those of us who have been fortunate enough to find natural ways to reverse and manage our vitiligo long-term may not feel the same urgency as many others do to get access to vitiligo drugs. And we may, with good reason, be wary of potential unknown side effects of new medications. But I have no doubt that effective pharmaceutical treatments are on their way and that, alongside existing medical and complementary therapies, these will improve the options available to everyone with vitiligo very significantly indeed.