Last Updated on 21st January 2025 by Caroline Haye
Vitiligo information and a gateway to the products
After a couple of months in a kind of website-limbo-land, I am pleased to announce a new look for Vitiligo Store. For the past 10 years the site has been a labour of love, born out of my own vitiligo recovery and designed to enable others to obtain the same nutritional supplements that prompted my almost total (and, so far, permanent) repigmentation.
A brief history of Vitiligo Store
I opened the store five years after first sharing my vitiligo success story online in my blog The Vit Pro. The motivation behind the blog was – and still is – to let others know that vitiligo is not irreversible. My pigment had started to disappear in patches from early childhood onwards. And, as a result, I spent half my life distressed and anxious about its impact on my appearance and self-confidence.
Early on I couldn’t find any information about this mysterious “curse” that afflicted me. Me and no one else on the entire planet. (That’s how it felt to me at the time.) And, when I did learn a bit about it, the only information I found was that it is a progressive and incurable skin condition… A depressing prognosis that sucked the hope out of me for decades. So, when I unexpectedly began to recover my natural skin colour, using nutritional supplements and sun exposure, I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to spread the good news to others who may similarly have lost all hope because of what their doctors were telling them.
Sharing my story online led to some great conversations and valued friendships with vitiligo sufferers all over the world and prompted many to ask me what supplements I was taking. Not just that, but how I was using them and what else I was doing. In fact, I received so many enquiries that I decided to set up Vitiligo Store to provide specific vitiligo-related information and supply the products themselves. Along with the supplements I began to add various other items like phototherapy devices and therapeutic clothing that could help to support the process of repigmentation. A one-stop-vitiligo-shop, if you will.
Why change Vitiligo Store?
As I gradually expanded the product range to include everything from hair dye to skin camouflage, I noticed that the vast majority of the products that customers ordered, used on a regular basis and repeatedly enthused over, remained the original core nutritional supplements… The same few products that had seen me through my own repigmentation and that I still use today.
The other thing I noticed – especially over the past couple of years – was that it was becoming more and more expensive and time consuming to run the site as an online shop with multiple product lines. Rapidly
rising operating costs, increasing numbers of requests for vitiligo support and a vitiligo blog to maintain, turned this one-woman, part-time labour of love into a tricky balancing act. So much so, that I was barely covering costs. And, as I didn’t want to ask my customers to pay more for their supplements or for shipping, it was obvious something else needed to change.
The future of Vitiligo Store
The best solution I could find was to transition Vitiligo Store from a shopping site into an information site with a gateway to the supplement manufacturer’s own online shop. By doing this, Vitiligo Store can still be a place for users to find out all about the products I used in my repigmentation and how I used them. And it will still provide a way for them to order those products by using the links provided.
[Note: Links from Vitiligo Store to the Xenca site create a modest revenue to contribute to ongoing running costs of both vitiligo websites and my time spent supporting the vitiligo friends who contact me. So I hope you will feel that using these links is fair exchange for the ongoing support and information that I continue to provide through both Vitiligo Store and The Vit Pro blog.]
The prices charged on Xenca’s site prices are exactly the same as they were on the original Vitiligo Store. And, since Xenca has always handled our deliveries direct from their warehouse anyway, customers will continue to get the same value and service as they always have.
Why keep Vitiligo Store at all?
So why keep the site at all? Well, because Xenca does not provide information or support on the use of any of their products for vitiligo recovery. This is because the supplements were never intended for that purpose. I only discovered by pure chance and my own experimentation that they had the potential to trigger and sustain repigmentation. So, from now on, Vitiligo Store will exist as a source of vitiligo and product information for anyone wanting to research or try the same nutritional protocol as I used to reverse my pigment loss. And it will incorporate links to the maker’s own shopping site to keep it as simple as it ever was to get hold of those products.
Finally, I want to reassure all my vitiligo friends, old and new, that I am still here to help anyone affected by vitiligo in any way I can. This was the inspiration for the blog and for the original store. And spreading the word that vitiligo does not have to be permanent continues to be my passion. 🙂
