If you’ve ever seen something unusual on your kid’s skin, you’ve likely turned to the internet for guidance as you anxiously wait for an appointment with your pediatrician. On health education sites, you’ll find images of every common dermatological condition, including eczema, hand-foot-and-mouth disease, chicken pox, impetigo and measles. But the images almost exclusively feature white patients.
For years, this has frustrated Ellen Buchanan Weiss, whose toddler son is mixed race. She’s tried searching for photographs online to reference conditions such as chicken pox and hives, but tells me that “even adding the qualifier ‘chicken pox on black child’ yields mostly Caucasian examples.” Recently, she decided to do something to help other parents facing similar barriers, and began collecting photos on her own. Her project Brown Skin Matters is an Instagram account filled with reference images of dermatological conditions on non-white skin. You can see what ant bites can look like on a child who is Hispanic and black. Or how the viral illness Fifths disease can manifest in a child who is black and white.
From the photos, it’s clear that conditions look different on different skin tones. On a post featuring a black child with chicken pox, one person commented: “Thank you! My mom (white) always said she wasn’t sure if we’d actually had chicken pox because they didn’t look how she expected. But the pediatrician said we did.”
While Weiss is not a medical professional, she is working with physicians to review the viewer-submitted photos. She emphasizes that the information on Brown Skin Matters is for educational and reference purposes only, and not a diagnosis. “I’m just a regular person who dearly loves her son and wants equitable representation and resources available to him and other people who look like him,” Weiss says.
@dxmedstudent
I just listened to a podcast about rashes with a dermatologist lamenting this very problem.
I just saw a dark skinned kid with what is probably hsp but I couldn’t find a picture of it on darker skin. This is so incredibly useful and I’m so excited for more and more people to contribute and build up this database.
This is amazing! We now just need a textbook/atlas with the same rashes on various shades of skin side by side. I’d say 70% of my patients are black and because of lack of training, I feel less skilled at recognizing these rashes on them. I love my patients and I want to do my best for them- movements like this are exactly how that can be accomplished!
