Before And After Of Sammy Sosa Skin

Sammy Sosa appears to have been doing something to lighten his skin as these before and after photos show. It isn’t just an effect of the photographers lights as we can see that while his wife’s complexion does indeed look lighter in the second, after photo of her and Sammy Sosa, the contrast between the two complexions changes. Thus there must have been a change in their relative coloring, whatever the absolute change brought about by the lighting.

It also does not seem to be a case of vitiligo, which is what Michael Jackson had. This normally advances in patches (it exists in your humble reporter’s own family) and does not change the entire complexion at one go.

We might also consider one other point: Sammy Sosa used to play baseball and as we might note about that, it takes place outside, in the sun, in summer. Yes, everyone tans, however dark their natural skin color, so we would expect that sort of deep tan to perhaps fade a little over time once he had stopped playing. But these Sammy Sosa before and after pictures seem to show something more than that.

And indeed, Sammy Sosa’s own explanation is that he has been using a skin cream to soften his face (along the lines of a conditioner) and this is what has lightened his skin color. Luckily for this particular story it is indeed true that the use of skin conditioners will lighten skin, at least conditioners of a certain sort. If you think of what is called “dermal abrasion”, the concept will seem obvious. The propensity to have one skin color or another is genetic of course, but the expression of it comes from the skin’s exposure to sunlight. And it is the melanin in that top layer of the skin which actually darkens to give the skin color (a scar on the face of a dark skinned person is just as pink as that on the face of a lighter skinned one).

So if the form of skin conditioning is this dermal abrasion, the rubbing away of that very top skin layer to reveal younger skin underneath, then a side effect will be to lighten a person’s skin color.

Some combination of all of the above would seem to explain the Sammy Sosa before and after pictures displayed.