1. Recent Skin Injury
If you have recently had surgery, trauma to the skin or even an acne pimple, your skin will take time to heal. The skin will create scar tissue to repair itself, which is usually flat and subsides over time. If your body begins to over-produce collagen, the scar tissue will continue to grow and expand past the area of the scar into healthy skin tissue. These growths, called keloids, are raised, firm and pink to dark red or brown. They often have a branch-like pattern as they expand out from the original scar. They may be itchy, tender and sometimes even painful. Keloids only begin to appear where there is scar tissue.
2. Self-Examination of Your Skin
Both you and your doctor should examine your skin for changes on a regular basis. This is primarily to detect skin cancer in its early stages, but the procedure is also beneficial for noting any new growths and changes. First, perform your self-exam after a bath or shower and in plenty of bright light. Use two mirrors, a full-length mirror and a handheld mirror. Get to know where all your normal freckles, moles and birthmarks are and how they look and feel. Next, look for any changes. Look at any healing, injured skin to see whether it is improving. Look for darker or reddish patches of skin that may rise higher than your normal skin level. Check for any hard lumps.
You will do a more complete self-exam if you create a routine that you follow every time. Note the date of each exam and anything unusual or new. If you do find something unusual, make an appointment to see your doctor.
3. Rule out the Rest
Before you decide that what you have are keloids, it is important to consider the other possibilities. There are many symptoms to rule out and make your diagnosis clearer. If they are keloids, the bumps should be raised, shiny, arched and solid. They will continue to grow, have a claw or branch-like pattern and a range in coloring from pink to dark red or brown. They can be itchy, tender and even painful to the touch and can become uncomfortably large.
Keloids tend to appear on the back, shoulders, chest and earlobes. If there are other symptoms present, you may have something else. For example, if the growths are filled with pus, located around a hair shaft or pore, swollen, tender, arbitrarily placed and itchy, blistery or accompanied by a rash, they may not be keloids. Also, if they appear quite suddenly or develop crusts, they are probably not keloids. You should visit your doctor to be sure.
