Contact & consultation

Arranging an assessment

Outpatient appointments are booked through the hospital on the numbers below; international patients can ask for Michael Yu. Bring photographs of your face from previous years if you have them, because melasma changes with season, pregnancy and hormonal treatment, and the pattern over time is more useful than any single description. Bring the list of everything you have already tried, including anything bought online.

What a good assessment includes

A judgement about whether the pigmentation is melasma or something else, a description of the pattern and an estimate of how deep the pigment sits, questions about light, heat, hormones and medicines, an assessment of your skin tone and how it has responded to previous treatment, and a clear statement of what each proposed step would change and what it would not. You should leave able to say what the plan is for, how long it will take, and what maintenance will involve.

Asking about the plan

Ask which step of the ladder you are starting on and why. Ask what would make light-based treatment unsafe for your skin, and what the risk of rebound darkening is in your case. Ask how long you should persist with a topical before judging it, and what the plan is if the patches fade and then return. Ask what you would be expected to keep doing for years. A clinician who answers that last question specifically is assessing you rather than presenting to you.

Before you commit

No decision needs to be made at the first appointment, and no course of sessions should be sold before an assessment is complete. Take the plan away, read it against the guides on this site, and come back with questions. Melasma is a long-term condition, so a plan that has to be decided in one afternoon is a plan that has not been thought about properly.