Almost all human beings are conscious about their beauty and they adopt all means to improve or maintain it. The quality of skin is having priority in the field of beauty care. Skin is considered as the mirror of the human body and it reflects the physical, mental and emotional status of every person. The number of people attending beauty clinics and dermatologists is increasing day by day. Even though skin diseases are having low mortality, people are worried about skin problems because of the social stigma. A person having a disease of some internal organ may not be worried but another person having a skin disease on the face may be depressed because of the simple reason 'others will come to know about my disease'. Human skin has got several functions like protection, heat regulation, water balance, excretion etc. It gives protection and support to the deep body tissues and has got the ability to stretch to some extent due to the presence of protein fibers in the dermis. But too fast enlargement of the body parts cause excessive stretching on the skin resulting in breaking of collagen and elastin fibers of the dermis. This causes slightly depressed discoloration called stria atrophia or stretch marks. Initially these marks are slightly pinkish and later become white or silvery in appearance. Stretch marks are found in conditions like pregnancy, puberty, obesity etc. It is usually seen in places like abdomen, thighs, breasts, buttocks, shoulders etc. Once these marks appear, time is required for them to be less prominent. Both men and women are the victims of stretch marks but it mainly affects women due to their beauty consciousness and causes psychological trauma leading to depression. On the other hand there are women who are least bothered to get rid of stretch marks and consider them as a badge of mother hood. Still the number of people visiting clinics to remove stretch marks is increasing day by day. Because of the increasing need for the stretch mark treatment modalities, there are number of products in the market to deal with stretch marks cure. But most of those products are not proved effective scientifically but few of them give results in many cases. Modern treatment methods like plastic surgery and laser surgery for stretch marks have been proved effective in the treatment. Author: Amy Tylor is the webmaster of Skin Care Blog: http://www.skin-care.healthcareu.com