The colour of our skin is due to a pigment called melanin. The more melanin you have in your skin the darker it will be.

There are a number of different medical conditions that can affect the formation of melanin. The most extreme of these is albinism, where the cells are unable to make melanin and so the hair and the skin of the entire body is completely white.

More commonly, groups of skin cells will for some reason, lose the ability to make melanin, so that white or paler patches appear on different parts of the body.

There are a number of conditions where this can happen. The most common of these is called vitiligo. Vitiligo affects about 1 in a 100 people. There have been suggestions that it might be commoner in darker skinned people, but it is not certain whether this is true, or whether it is simply that the condition is more obvious in people with black or brown skins.

The cause of vitiligo, and nearly all the other conditions where paler patches appear due to melanin loss, is not known. But none of the conditions that lead to the loss of the skin colour are related to cancer, and none of them increases the risk of cancer developing.

So you can be reassured that the appearance of these whitish patches is not a sign that you are developing a skin cancer.