Well, hello, hello, guys. You're listening to Beauty Bites with Dr. K, Secrets of a Plastic Surgeon,

and today it's time for a five-minute Friday, and I'm going to talk to you

all about bleaching agents like hydroquinone. So hydroquinone is one of the most common and widely used

bleaching agents in the medical specialty of dermatology. And it's been around for many decades.

It's actually, in my opinion, the gold standard for the treatment of hyperpigmentation,

and it's very effective to treat malasma, brown spots, age spots, acne scars, and sun damage.

And it's been controversial recently, whether or not to use hydroquinone, whether it's an ingredient that we want to weed out of our skincare regimens.

But I just want to encourage you that if you have melasma, this is a really effective and widely used tool that can be very safely used.

And in my opinion, it's the most effective ingredient we have for fading brown spots,

uneven skin tones, and pigmentation that's overgrown in your skin. It's been used for more than 50

years and nothing else has that track record. So what is hydroquinone? It is a bleaching agent, a depigmenting agent. It lightens dark patches in your

skin. And how does it work? It works by decreasing the number of melanocytes present in inhibiting

the activity of tyrosinase. This is the enzyme that catalyzes melanin production. Hydroquinone

limits your skin from making excessive amounts of melanin,

and that in turn is what's deposited into the dermal layer of your skin,

creating the coloration.

So if you have excessive production of melanin,

the melanogenesis can be interrupted by shutting down the enzyme cascade, where tyrosanase,

this enzyme is blocked by hydroquinone.

There are multiple ingredients that we can use to treat brown spots.

So if you're sensitive to hydroquinone, you're worried about it, safety, or you don't want to use it.

Of course, we have alternatives like cogic acid, azaleic acid,

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