I was so honored to be a participant in the 2016 TEDxUNC event, Bodies: Being Human, earlier this year! There were some amazing speakers, and I had such a great time with the students too. I was super nervous about the whole thing (there were 1400 people in the audience at a huge auditorium on the
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People ask me all the time if there’s a cure for dermatographia. Unfortunately it’s not such an easy answer. Everyone’s triggers and causes are so different that what reduces one person’s itchiness might do nothing for another. This makes it super hard to know what to tell people who ask me how to lessen the
Dr. James Hamblin wrote this awesome article about Skin Tome and dermatographia in The Atlantic: “They knew that their skin did something weird, but they didn’t know what it was.” People who reach out to Ariana Page Russell, an artist in Brooklyn, often see their own skin in hers. Many have epidermal reactions like Russell’s,
Frequently I get emails asking me if those of us with dermatographia can get tattooed. Yes, we can. I have tattoos, and no, I’ve never had any problems getting them. What seems to happen is my system gets worn out from releasing all that histamine in response to
Have you ever wondered what dermatographia looks like as it appears and then disappears? Well now you can see it firsthand! I made this video to illustrate the process: First I start with a template (since the drawing takes a few minutes to appear, it's hard to see what I'm doing without a template). This
Frequently I get asked how I manage my dermatographia. My new friend Ellen in Hong Kong asked how I deal with our skin condition, so I wrote this post. [Update: Check out this post (click here) for even more tips, and here's my updated Dermatographia page too] About 5% of the population has dermatographia, and
