#HRT has made my freckles much more prominent

[random-random-things]

A scandalous photo of my bare shoulder

[catboybiologist]

I'll probably add some of this in my next journal, but there's a few things that might be minor HRT effects that I'm only starting to notice now.

One is that I'm pretty sure the "contrast" of my skin color is a lot more. I'm very pale, but tan easily, and have a lot of light freckles, various moles I've had for life, and also an accumulated set of scars, bruises, scrapes, a farmer's tan, and more. All of them seem like they're getting more prominent, even though my overall skin darkness/lightness hasn't changed at all. It could be something subtle with pigmentation that's hard to put my finger on, or more likely, it could be that a thinning of my body hair has made other dark spots stand out.

Overall, I'm loving it. Moles and freckles are something I find very attractive, so seeing the dusting of freckles on my cheeks actually start to become visible has been really nice. It doesn't show in any pictures, but I'll try to fix that.

CW for the rest of this.

It does have the interesting effect of making my decade-old self harm scars, which I thought were close to fading entirely, come back more visibly. Doesn't bother me that much, but it means I gotta dodge uncomfortable questions occasionally. Nothing I'm not used to.

Although I will say, one benefit of leading an active lifestyle is that I have so many scars and bruises for legitimate reasons that they overshadow the self harm ones. I find it hilarious that I have so many scars that I actually got from things I used to use as excuses. I actually have scratches from cats, blackberry bushes, knife slips when opening large boxes, trips and falls, nails, and uh, nsfw reasons now, and they're all jumbled and intermixed with the old self harm scars. The only way to distinguish them is that the self harm scars form the classic "barcode" pattern of perfectly parallel lines, whereas other scars are more random.

Again, doesn't bother me too much, but it is interesting to note.