Hyperpigmentation shows up as patches or spots of skin that are darker than the surrounding area. The color ranges from light brown to black, and in deeper skin tones, it can appear slate blue, gray, or deep purple-brown. These dark areas can be as small as a freckle or spread across large sections of the face or body. What hyperpigmentation looks like depends largely on what’s causing it, where it is on your body, and your natural skin tone.
The Most Common Types and How They Differ
Not all dark spots look the same. The three most common forms of hyperpigmentation each have a distinct visual pattern that’s relatively easy to identify once you know what to look for.
Sun Spots (Solar Lentigines)
Sun spots are flat, oval, evenly colored marks that show up on areas with the most sun exposure: the backs of your hands, forearms, shoulders, face, and chest. They range from tan to black and typically measure 3 to 20 millimeters, roughly the size of a pencil eraser or smaller. Their edges are usually well-defined and smooth, and they don’t rise above the skin’s surface. People sometimes call them age spots or liver spots, but sun damage is the actual cause. They tend to multiply over time, especially after age 40, and you’ll often see several clustered together.
Post-Inflammatory Hyperpigmentation (PIH)
This type appears exactly where your skin was previously injured or inflamed. If you’ve had acne, a burn, an insect bite, eczema, or even an aggressive skin treatment, the dark mark left behind is PIH. The patches range from light brown to black and mirror the shape of the original wound or breakout. So a line of acne along your jawline leaves a line of dark spots along your jawline. A scrape on your knee leaves a dark patch shaped like the scrape.
When the excess pigment sits in the upper layers of skin, it looks brown. When it drops deeper into the skin, it takes on a grey, purple, or blue-brown hue. This color difference matters because it signals how long the marks will take to fade. Surface-level brown marks can resolve in months, while deeper grey-toned discoloration can persist for years.
Melasma
Melasma looks dramatically different from scattered spots. It appears as large, symmetrical patches with soft, irregular borders, almost like a shadow cast across the face. The color is typically brown to grey-brown, and the patches affect both sides of the face in a mirror-image pattern.
Three distinct patterns account for most cases. The centrofacial pattern, which shows up in 50 to 80 percent of people with melasma, covers the forehead, cheeks, nose, and upper lip while sparing the small groove between the nose and mouth. The malar pattern concentrates on the cheeks and nose. The mandibular pattern runs along the jawline and chin. Melasma is most common during pregnancy, with hormonal contraceptive use, and in people with medium to dark skin tones. Unlike sun spots, which are clearly defined, melasma has blurred edges that fade gradually into the surrounding skin.
How It Looks on Different Skin Tones
Hyperpigmentation affects all skin tones, but its appearance shifts significantly depending on how much natural pigment your skin already contains. On lighter skin, dark spots tend to appear tan or light brown with clear contrast against the surrounding area. On medium skin tones, the patches are typically medium to dark brown.
On darker skin tones, hyperpigmentation can look quite different from what most online images show. The spots may appear deep brown, but they can also present as slate blue, grey, or purple-brown, especially when the pigment has settled into deeper layers of the skin. According to the American Academy of Dermatology, deep discoloration that appears blue-grey in darker skin can take significantly longer to fade than surface-level brown marks. This deeper pigment is also harder to treat and more likely to be permanent without intervention.
People with darker skin are more prone to post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation in particular. Even minor inflammation, like a small pimple or a razor bump, can trigger noticeable dark marks that persist for months.
Where Hyperpigmentation Typically Appears
Location is one of the easiest ways to narrow down what type of hyperpigmentation you’re dealing with. Sun spots cluster on sun-exposed areas: face, hands, forearms, upper chest, and shoulders. They rarely appear on skin that stays covered.
Melasma is almost exclusively a facial condition, though it occasionally appears on the forearms or chest. Its symmetrical, bilateral pattern is its most recognizable feature. If you have matching brown patches on both cheeks, melasma is the most likely explanation.
PIH can appear anywhere on the body because it follows injury, not sun exposure. You might see it on your back from old acne, on your legs from insect bites, or around your bikini line from ingrown hairs. The key visual clue is that every dark mark maps directly to a spot where something happened to the skin.
Texture and Surface Characteristics
Hyperpigmentation is almost always flat. This is one of its defining visual characteristics and one of the most important things to check. The dark areas should feel the same as the skin around them when you run a finger over them. There’s no roughness, no raised edge, no scaly texture. The only change is color.
If a dark spot is raised, rough, scaly, or has an unusual texture, it may not be simple hyperpigmentation. Seborrheic keratoses, for example, are raised brown growths that look waxy or “stuck on.” And melanoma, though rare, can present as a dark spot with irregular features.
When a Dark Spot Could Be Something Else
Most hyperpigmentation is harmless, but certain visual features distinguish benign dark spots from potentially dangerous ones. The National Cancer Institute outlines the ABCDE criteria for identifying melanoma: asymmetry (one half doesn’t match the other), irregular borders (ragged, notched, or blurred edges where pigment seems to spread into surrounding skin), uneven color (a mix of black, brown, tan, white, grey, red, pink, or blue within one spot), diameter larger than 6 millimeters (about the width of a pencil eraser), and evolution (the spot has changed in size, shape, or color over weeks or months).
Ordinary hyperpigmentation is stable. A sun spot might darken slightly with more sun exposure, but it doesn’t change shape, sprout new colors, or grow rapidly. A PIH mark from a healed pimple gradually fades over time rather than expanding. If any dark spot on your skin is actively changing, growing, or developing new colors, that warrants a closer look from a dermatologist. The same applies to any spot that bleeds, itches persistently, or looks noticeably different from other marks on your body.