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Editorial · the United Kingdom

What do you want to understand?

This site is not a clinic and does not pretend to any clinical authority. It explains what dermatological conditions are, how a consultation is likely to go, and what the words used in one actually mean. Every page ends in the same place: seeing a qualified dermatologist, who is the only person able to say anything about your skin in particular.

Browse conditionsRead the glossary

A cross-section, from the surface down

  1. stratum corneum
  2. epidermis
  3. dermis
  4. hypodermis

Every condition page opens by saying which of these four it involves.

No diagnosisNo symptom checker, no image matching, nothing that guesses at what you have.
Primary sourcesThe body that published the guidance, linked and dated, never a paraphrase.
No clinic directoryNobody pays to appear here, and no practitioner is named or recommended.

Where would you like to start?

Six ways in, phrased the way people actually arrive at dermatology rather than the way a clinic would file them. Pick the sentence that sounds like your own situation. Each one opens on a page written to be read in ten minutes, not skimmed for a verdict.

Who is this for?

Anyone with a dermatology appointment ahead of them, or one just behind them. A dermatology consultation is short, its vocabulary is dense, and very little prepares a person for either of those things.

Readers arrive from several directions. Some have been referred to dermatology and want to know what the referral actually said. Some have been seen already and are holding a letter written in a register nobody translated for them. Others have no appointment at all and simply want the words their general practitioner used to make sense.

None of them needs another page guessing at a diagnosis. That guess is precisely what a dermatology consultation supplies and what a website cannot, and every page here is written around that limit rather than against it. Knowing the anatomy, the vocabulary of dermatology and the shape of the appointment makes the consultation work better without requiring anybody to pretend they can examine your skin.

Much of what dermatology deals with is also worth knowing whether or not an appointment is ever made: how skin is layered, why depth changes everything in dermatology, what a published guideline is for and who maintains it.

The same drawing on every page

Dermatology is mostly a question of depth, and this is the single idea that dermatology pages elsewhere most often leave out. Which layer of the skin something involves changes what it looks like, how it behaves, how it is examined and what a clinician can do about it. Every condition page opens with this cross-section, with the relevant layer picked out, so that the anatomy stops being an abstraction after the second page you read.

Schematic cross-section of the skin, the dermis highlightedFour stacked layers are drawn from the surface downwards: stratum corneum, epidermis, dermis and hypodermis. The dermis is picked out in blue; the other layers are hatched. The drawing is schematic and not to scale.dermis
dermis — The same schematic appears on every condition page, with a different layer highlighted. Schematic, not to scale.

The drawing is deliberately abstract. It shows no skin tone, no texture and nothing that could be mistaken for a photograph of anybody, which is what makes it usable on every page without illustrating a single person's condition.

A thick slab of layered plaster and paper, broken cleanly in half so that four distinct strata show in the cut edge, the second one tinted blue.
Skin is built in layers, and almost everything on this site comes back to which layer something is happening in.

What is on this site

Five sections, each answering a different kind of dermatology question. They are written to be read in any order, and every page links to the ones next to it, so that a term met in one place can be looked up in another without losing your way.

ConditionsWhat individual conditions are, which layer of skin they involve, and the words a clinician uses about them. None of these pages will tell you what you have.Treatments explainedWhat a class of treatment is and how it is supervised. Never how to use one: doses, schedules and combinations belong to whoever has examined your skin.Sun protectionHow skin responds to ultraviolet radiation, what the wording on a bottle refers to, and who decides what it is allowed to say.GuidesThe consultation itself: preparing for it, describing a problem, what an examination involves, and how to read the letter that arrives afterwards.GlossaryShort definitions of the vocabulary, each tied to the layer of skin it belongs to and cited from the pages that use it.

What is behind these pages

Four figures, all of them counted from the site rather than typed into it. A page about dermatology that gets its own volume wrong has no claim on your trust for anything else.

24condition pagesEach opens with the layer of skin involved.
26defined termsPublished as open data under CC BY 4.0.
9cited organisationsReuse terms for each one checked and dated.
2026-08-06last reviewedAnything older than eighteen months is reflagged.

None of these numbers is a claim about expertise. Counting pages proves that the pages exist and that somebody dated them, which is the smallest promise a dermatology site can make. It is also the one most often skipped, and the reason a reader can check everything else here against a source rather than against a tone of voice.

The glossary and the reuse terms of every source are published as downloadable open data. See the open data.

How a fact gets onto a page

Anything numerical, regulatory or official is held in a dated file rather than typed into the prose. Each entry carries the primary source it came from, the area it applies to, and the date it was last checked, and you see that date next to the figure. An entry without a source and a date does not display at all.

The consequence is that pages sometimes go out with a gap where a figure could have been. That is intended. A missing number costs a reader very little; an invented one costs them the ability to trust anything else on the page. Where a published set of criteria exists, this site links to it rather than paraphrasing it, because a paraphrase of a checklist is a reliable way to change its meaning while appearing to preserve it.

Sources are primary wherever a primary source exists: the body that published the guidance, not an article about it. Anything checked more than eighteen months ago is flagged for rechecking. Public health material is revised, and last year's page is not evidence of this year's position.

What this site does not do

It does not diagnose, does not suggest treatments, does not name practitioners and does not send anyone towards a particular clinic. There are no before and after photographs and no clinical images. There is no symptom checker, and its absence is a decision rather than an oversight: matching a description to your own skin is the part that goes wrong, and it goes wrong in both directions, talking people out of appointments as often as into them.

Nor is there a page for finding a dermatology clinic near you, and there will not be one. A directory of that kind is lead generation wearing an information page as a disguise, and it is the single addition that would make everything else here untrustworthy.

The site is written by editors rather than clinicians and carries no medical review. That is stated plainly on the editorial policy page rather than glossed over, because a health site that is vague about who wrote it has already asked you for more trust than it has earned.