The lack of awareness starts early: Most medical textbooks depict proportionally fewer skin conditions on people of color (these pics, btw, are critical for proper diagnosis, says Lynn McKinley-Grant, MD, former president of the Skin of Color Society). And because issues like eczema and melanoma look different or can be located in different places on various skin tones, doctors can misdiagnose or miss them entirely, which can have deadly outcomes.

What’s more, people of color are often under-represented in clinical trials for Rx treatments—making this stuff potentially ineffective or unsafe for us to use. Also alarming: Only 3 percent of U.S. dermatologists identify as Black and 4.2 percent identify as Hispanic, according to a 2016 article in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.

Read the full article at www.cosmopolitan.com