Chennai sun, humidity and your skin

High UV nearly all year and coastal humidity make a specific set of problems. What that means for tanning and pigmentation.

Chennai’s summer does four separate things to skin: it tans it, it drives patchy uneven pigmentation, it flares melasma, and over years it breaks down collagen. Most of it is preventable and much of it is treatable. None of it is treated in a single session, and none of it stays treated without daily sun protection — including through the monsoon.

What a Chennai summer does that a milder one does not

Chennai sits at about thirteen degrees north, so the midday sun here is close to overhead rather than slanting in. Ultraviolet intensity is rated very high to extreme for much of the year, and it does not confine itself to April, May and June — it is simply at its most punishing then, through the stretch of May that Tamil Nadu calls Agni Nakshathiram.

Two local habits do most of the damage, and neither feels like sun exposure at the time. The first is the commute. If you drive, you sit on the right of the car, and the right side of your face and your right forearm collect years more sun than the left — an asymmetry patients almost never notice until it is pointed out. If you ride, it is the strip of neck between helmet and collar, and the backs of the hands.

The second is the sea. The breeze that makes an evening at the Marina bearable does nothing whatsoever about ultraviolet, and water and sand reflect more of it back at you. Feeling cool is not the same as being protected.

Humidity finishes the job. Sunscreen feels heavy here, so people apply a thin smear or skip it altogether, and sweat removes what did go on. An under-applied sunscreen is closer to no sunscreen than to a full one.

And the monsoon is not a holiday. Cloud stops the glare, not the ultraviolet, so three months of skipping protection between October and December quietly undoes the work of the previous summer.

Tan, dark marks and melasma are three different problems

They get lumped together as pigmentation, treated as one thing, and then blamed for not responding. They behave quite differently.

A tan is the skin doing its job — melanin produced as a defence against ultraviolet. It is even, it covers exposed areas, and given sun protection and time it fades on its own. It does not need a machine.

Dark marks left behind by acne, an insect bite, a scratch or a reaction are post-inflammatory pigmentation. They sit exactly where the inflammation was, which is how you recognise them, and in deeper skin tones they can take many months to fade. The two things that matter are settling the inflammation that caused them and protecting them while they resolve; the marks that stay dark longest are the ones that kept getting sun.

Melasma is the difficult one. It appears as symmetrical brown or greyish patches, usually across the cheeks, upper lip, forehead or jaw, and it is a chronic, relapsing condition rather than an event. It is driven by ultraviolet, by hormones, and — importantly here — by heat and by visible light, not only by UV. That is why melasma flares in Chennai kitchens and on Chennai roads even in people who wear sunscreen faithfully, and why a tinted sunscreen containing iron oxides, which screens visible light too, is usually the better choice for it. Melasma can be managed and improved. It is not cured, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not treated much of it.

“Sun protection is not the boring part of a pigmentation plan. It is the plan. Everything else is an accelerant.”

What helps, in the order that matters

Protection first, and properly: a broad-spectrum sunscreen every morning, enough of it, reapplied when you have been out or sweating. A gel or fluid texture for oily skin in this climate; a tinted formulation if melasma is the concern. Then the physical measures no cream replaces — timing errands outside the middle of the day, long sleeves on the bike, and the window film most people only think about after the damage is visible.

Then the diagnosis. What is treated, and with what, depends entirely on which of the three problems you actually have — and most faces here have a mixture, which is why single-machine plans disappoint. Topical treatment usually comes before procedures. Peels, and where appropriate laser or microneedling, are used in courses spaced over weeks, at conservative settings on deeper skin tones, and always alongside daily protection rather than instead of it.

Expect months rather than weeks, and expect maintenance. Pigmentation in a city this sunny is managed, not finished.

Who should wait, and what makes it worse

Do not start peels or laser on freshly tanned or sunburnt skin. In deeper skin tones, treating inflamed or recently sun-exposed skin is a reliable way to end up with more pigmentation than you started with. Skin should be settled and protected first.

Aggressive treatment of unstable melasma can worsen it, so an assessment that concludes with waiting is a good assessment. Anyone who will not or cannot use sunscreen daily should not begin a pigment-directed course at all — the pigment returns, sometimes darker, and the money is wasted. Active acne is controlled before its marks are chased. In pregnancy and breastfeeding, several actives are avoided and pregnancy-related melasma often improves after delivery, so the sensible plan is assessment rather than urgency.

One thing is worth naming plainly: the skin-lightening combination creams sold across counters here without a prescription frequently contain a potent steroid. Used for months on the face they thin the skin, cause redness, broken vessels and a rebound flare that is considerably harder to treat than the pigmentation that prompted them. If a cream is making your skin lighter within a fortnight, that is the reason to have it checked, not to buy another tube.

Reviewed by the Kremlin Aesthetics clinical team. Last updated 18 August 2026.