My oldest boy asked me recently, “How do we get freckles?” Somewhere buried in my head was the answer to this question — you know, something about skin pigment, melanin, the sun — but I wasn’t quite sure how to explain for an 8-year-old brain. My trusty laptop was nearby, though, so I did a quick search for, well, “How do we get freckles?” Some of what I found was heavy on the scientific, medical jargon — melanocortin-1 receptor MC1R gene variant, melanocytes, blah, blah, blah — and since I didn’t really understand it, I was pretty sure my second-grader wouldn’t either. So I kept searching, and I found this: “Freckling is caused by the uneven distribution of the melanin pigment in the skin. A freckle is essentially nothing more than an unusually heavy deposit of melanin at one spot in the skin.”

Now, that I understand. And so does my kid.

How would you explain freckles to your young ones?

photo by: fotologic on flickr