See What Baby Rashes Look Like on Dark Skin With Brown Skin Matters
If you’ve ever seen something unusual on your baby’s skin, you’ve probably turned to the internet for advice as you look forward to seeing your pediatrician. On health education websites, you will find images of all common dermatological conditions, including eczema, foot and mouth disease, chickenpox, impetigo, and measles. But the images almost always show white patients. (To see for yourself, just do a quick search for these conditions on the Mayo Clinic, WebMD, and American Dermatological Association websites. Even images of bumps, sores, and rashes only appear on white skin.)
For years, this upset Ellen Buchanan Weiss, whose young son was a mixed race. She tried to search the Internet for photographs related to diseases such as chickenpox and urticaria, but told me that “even adding the qualifier ‘chickenpox in black children’ provides mostly Caucasian examples.” She recently decided to do something to help other parents facing similar obstacles and began collecting photographs on her own. HerBrown Skin Matters project is an Instagram account filled with reference images of dermatological conditions on non-white skin. You can see what ant bites might look like in a Hispanic and black baby . Or how the viral disease of the Fifth can manifest itself in a black and white child .
You can see from the photos that conditions look different for different skin tones. One person commented on a post featuring a black child with chickenpox: “Thank you! My mom (white) always said she wasn’t sure if we really had chickenpox because they didn’t look what she expected. But the pediatrician said yes. “
Although Weiss is not a medical professional, she and the doctors check the photographs submitted by the audience. She emphasizes that the information on Brown Skin Matters is for educational and reference purposes only, and not for diagnosis. “I am an ordinary person who loves my son very much and wants fair representation and resources available to him and other people who are like him,” says Weiss.