Stretch marks are common and can affect both men and women, although we most commonly associate them with pregnancy. They can, in fact, appear during puberty or other periods of rapid growth or weight gain or loss.
Stretch marks appear when the skin is stretched beyond its elastic capacity, causing the dermal layer to tear. As a result, the lower layer of skin is visible through the surface of the skin, hence to red or purple colour. The skin can feel strange and indented and the texture can appear rippled.
While these marks are not dangerous and usually only cause problems of a cosmetic nature, they can be a real pain to live with. The reddish-purple colour tends to fade with time, slowly turning a silvery-white. The problem with this is that they still remain a different colour from the healthy skin tissue around them, which becomes only more obvious if the rest of the body is tanned.
Stretch mark removal can provide an effective solution to this problem. A combination of microdermabrasion and laser therapy is used to remove damaged superficial layers of skin and stimulate the production of collagen and healthy skin cells.
