What are Scars?
When your skin is injured, your body repairs the damage to the best of its ability. Depending on how deep your injury is and how many layers of the skin are injured, your body’s ability to repair the damage is affected. New skin may grow on the top layers of skin. When the damage is deeper than that, your body creates a material that is thicker than skin to repair the wound. This thicker material often creates a scar.
New scars usually have a pink or red color, but the color may change to lighter or darker than one’s skin tone as the scar ages. Most scars are flat and may have a different texture than regular skin. Occasionally scars are not flush with the level of the healthy skin around them. A scar may be sunken below skin level if there had been inflammation at the site, such as from chicken pox or other lesion-producing conditions. The inflammation destroys collagen in the skin; thus, the scar is sunken looking after the lesion has gone away. When the wound to the skin is deep, and if the body repairs it with a lot of extra tissue, there can be a raised scar. If there is excessive scar tissue that is significantly raised, it may be a keloid.
Seeing a dermatologist before a wound has completely healed may prevent or lessen the appearance of some scars. The right wound care can prevent or lessen some scars because how wounds are cared for directly affect how skin heals. How dry or moist a wound is, what is applied to it and how and if stitches are used all make a big impact. Please contact our office for help with your wound healing concerns. We can greatly affect how your skin appears after it heals.