Your Signal
Stretch Marks
11 min read
Also known as: striae · pregnancy stripes · striae distensae · growth stripes · tissue tears · skin stripes · red stripes on the skin · white stripes on the abdomen · skin stretch tears · connective tissue tears · stretch marks
Your Body Is Speaking
First they are violet-red lines that pull across your skin like fine lightning. Later they fade to pearl-white scars that stay. They appear where your body grew larger in a short time than your skin was ready to follow — on the abdomen, the hips, the thighs, the breasts, sometimes also on the arms or back. Pregnancy, puberty, rapid weight gain, intensive muscle building — all of this can leave stretch marks behind.
Medicine explains them simply: the connective tissue has torn at certain points because growth exceeded its capacity to stretch. The collagen fibres broke, and the skin shows as scarring what happened beneath it. Technically speaking, this is entirely correct.
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