If your yearly vacations have always found you basking in the sun at the pool or the ocean shore, you might have noticed that your skin tones have changed over the years. What are those strange, freckle-like spots that appear on the skin after sun bathing? You might be among the many unknowing victims of sun spots.

In order to work towards treatment options, you need to be able to identify these markings. Read on to inform yourself about how to identify and treat these skin pigmentations.

Age spots, sun spots and liver spots - are they the same thing?

Because there are many different ways of naming the same thing, it's easy to be confused about age spots, sun spots and liver spots. No matter what name they may have, the conclusions are the same: sun spots cause the skin look decades older than it should, making skin care products to fade age spots a necessary investment.

How do I know if I have a sun spot?

Sun spots, age spots or liver spots are usually brown specks similar to freckles that appear on the areas of the skin most commonly exposed to the sun, such as the face, hands, shoulders and back. Liver spots range in color and can even be blackish - something that depends on the individual case and skin tone. Sun spots are essentially pigments in the skin that have been damaged by the sun, causing the skin to look aged and/or worn.

How can I rejuvenate my sun-spotted skin?

Sun and age spots are mostly removed using simple but expensive medical and cosmetic procedures, or special aging skin care products. Those folks interested in skin regeneration should thoroughly investigate the different available programs for skin renovation today. The most common age spot remover methods are Microdermabrasion, Bleaching Creams, Laser Surgery and Chemical Peels.

What makes sun spots occur?

Age spots are principally caused by skin sun damage. Spotting and hyper-pigmentation occur when the skin's melanocytes begin to overproduce the body's melanin components. Melanocytes produce the pigments that cause you to sun tan.

When your skin becomes over-exposed to the sun, melanocytes can malfunction and produce too much melanin pigment. The melanin excess then causes the brown or red spots we know as sun spots, often leading to melasma as well.

In conclusion, concerns about sun spots are mostly cosmetic, because the majority of them are not a health threat. However, average person's eye cannot distinguish skin cancer from harmless dark spots. It is extremely important that you see a skin specialist in order to verify that none of your sun spots are cancerous.