When your vitiligo repigments

Last Updated on 19th June 2023 by Caroline Haye

It feels like an impossible dream come true

Have you ever had that dream? The one when your vitiligo repigments? You wake up in the morning and, for a few surreal moments, you feel a sense of elation because you believe that your patchy skin has returned to normal and you are free to be your old confident self again. Then, cold reality hits… And yet you get up and look in the mirror anyway, just in case the impossible really did happen during the night. Well, I had that dream many times. And, of course, I was disappointed every time… Until it finally came true in real life. And in a totally unexpected way.

Some things in real life are literally impossible (like reversing time or holding back the tide). Others simply appear to be impossible. So we naturally assume this to be the case. I have learned from personal experience that, contrary to popular opinion, repigmenting vitiligo comes into the second category, not the first. And, more than that, I have learned that this realisation in itself has the power to change the way you view vitiligo for ever.

For the whole of my childhood and most of my adult life I was convinced that vitiligo was an irreversible condition. No one ever offered me any hope (short of a genuine miracle) that recovery was possible. I had never heard of anyone who had repigmented. Then again, I wasn’t aware of anyone else who had the condition because nobody ever talked about it in those days. Doctors simply referred to it as a progressive and incurable skin disease. (How encouraging.) What they actually knew about it at that time is pretty much summed up in this short paragraph. And all my pigment had ever done was prove the doctors right by continuing to vanish without trace.

If you believe it’s impossible, you stop trying

When all of your past experiences (and professionals’ opinions) tell you that a thing is impossible, something extremely counterproductive happens. You end up believing so utterly in this presumed impossibility that you stop hoping. You may even stop dreaming that dream I mentioned earlier. Worst of all, you stop trying. And the reason I say that the worst thing of all is to stop trying is because it is the trying that ultimately gets results.

I know what I am talking about when I say this because I went through exactly that process. Decades of hoping, praying (even bargaining with God) and trying every potential remedy I came across proved fruitless. I was eventually so worn down by disappointment, and so demoralised and exhausted by the whole thing, that I abandoned all hope of recovery. The only course left to me, so I thought, was to hide my patchy skin as best I could and do my utmost to pretend it didn’t exist… Which was actually just as exhausting and I never managed it for long.

A chance decision that changed everything

It scares me to think that I might have carried on in this frame of mind for the rest of my life. In which case, I have no doubt I would have continued to lose pigment and to believe that repigmentation was an impossible dream. I was no longer actively looking for solutions because I didn’t think they existed. But a completely unexpected chance came along, in connection with my work at the time, for me to sample some nutritional supplements.

I can’t say the idea excited me particularly. The supplements in question were not for use with vitiligo or any specific condition. But I felt like there was nothing to lose and possibly some general health benefits to gain. So I decided to give them a shot. (The fact that one of these products was aimed at promoting a richer natural suntan was the feature that first got my attention. But I didn’t seriously expect it would impact my vitiligo. So my attitude was one of idle curiosity more than anything. In fact, it was almost a case of “let’s just see what else won’t work”.) But my half-hearted decision to give these supplements a go was literally life changing. In fact, it didn’t just change my health. It changed my whole outlook.

My 80% vitiligo repigmented almost completely

Within a couple of weeks of starting the supplements I began noticing several very welcome health benefits, including plumper, smoother skin, fewer aches and pains, increased energy and improved digestion. These alone were enough to keep me going and I practically forgot to look for any alterations to my vitiligo. So when freckles started to appear on my white patches about 6 weeks later I was shocked… So shocked, in fact, that I literally didn’t believe it. I almost expected to wake up to find it was that dream again. (I even tried washing the freckles off, thinking they were the remnants of fake tan.)

It was another 18 months or so before my vitiligo repigmented to its fullest extent. And during that period whole sections of my skin looked like an abstract artist’s experimental canvas. But I didn’t care about that. Freckles piled in on top of more freckles in some areas, creating strange patterns and changing on an almost daily basis. You might think that this was unnerving but it really wasn’t… Not like it had been when I was losing pigment day by day. This, by contrast, was an exciting journey that I had truly thought was impossible. And yet I was witnessing it at first hand, on my own body.

I didn’t start off expecting total recovery. I was just grateful for each improvement as it happened. Each pin prick or splotch of new pigment was a cause for celebration. It was like seeing much loved old friends after years of being apart. (You don’t care what they look like. And, even if you don’t get to see as much of them as you would ideally like, it is still better than not seeing them at all.)

My misconceptions about vitiligo were turned on their head

Even though I was mentally prepared for this process to stall at some point, it actually continued until the original 80% pigment loss dwindled to around 2%, at which point it was practically unnoticeable. An almost total turnaround, back to my natural skin colour, had occurred in the space of a year and a half. But an equivalent turnaround in my mindset had already occurred the minute I recognised that the first freckles to appear were real and not fake tan after all.

Right at that moment I had become living proof that repigmenting vitiligo was not impossible. All at once the misconceptions that had built up in my mind over a lifetime fell away. If I had been a prisoner and had all my shackles removed and my cell door left open I could not have felt more liberated… Freed from all those long-held beliefs and freed also to be my former, confident self again after so many decades of hiding behind a protective wall of my own making.

The reason I share this experience

With the benefit of hindsight, I could kick myself for being resigned to the impossibility of vitiligo recovery for such a large chunk of my life. Accepting the common misconception that this condition cannot be reversed almost robbed me of the will to keep trying. It was only a stroke of fate, if you want to call it that, that turned everything on its head… And turned a desperately longed-for dream into reality.

But I recognise that I am very fortunate to have had this wonderful experience. And the reason I am always so keen to share it with as many people I can is not because I necessarily think everyone else’s vitiligo journey would, or should, take the same course as mine. I keep sharing it because I know that, whilst some are content to embrace their vitiligo, many more are not. Many have given up out of disillusionment. And, in doing so, they have lost much more than just pigment. They have lost their hope, their ability to dream and their will to try the next therapy that could work for them. So this blog is for you, to try to put into words how it feels when your vitiligo repigments and to reassure you that it is not the impossible dream you may have been led to believe.