In addition, Michael is NOT the only person who suffers from Vitiligo. There are other cases. The Vitiligo Society states the following:
"It affects at least ONE in every HUNDRED people in countries throughout the world. It affects people of both sexes equally, and it affects all races. It can begin at any age, though about fifty percent of people with vitiligo develop it before the age of twenty five."

Let's see together the famous cases:

Black and White

"My skin got changed, but I still remain the same. The slavery of the beauty and the welfare make us inhuman. Now I'm more free"

Jeffrey Stanton Bell, black or white? He was born black, but vitiligo is winning the game and now, almost all his body is now white. Jeffrey, 43 years old, was a top model in New York but this illness took him away of his work, leaving him almost without friends and plunged him in a depression and anguish. "I had only an obsession: to give some sense to my existence" he said. He leaves the treatment with ultraviolet rays and he has decided to assume his change of identity. "The day that I understood the nature had done its way and that its steps were irreversible, it was when I left myself to be carried for the river of life". Now he owns a restaurant in Manhattan and reads classics books.

Vitiligo has changed black skin of Jeffrey in a big white spot.

The color disappears first in the small folds that skin forms and in the articulations. Then, the clear spots go extending all over the body. In only six months, Jeffrey Stanton Bell, black American, turned white from head to feet. Even his hair lost some color. They detected the illness back in 1993. He was 33 years old and the diagnosis hit him like a hammer: vitiligo (that derives from the latin word to appoint the white spots), caused by a dysfunction of the cells of the pigmentation. It affects to 2% of the world population.

Vitíligo appears for chance, without any known cause, and its origins are lost in history of the world. From the pharaohs to the Greeks and the old Hebrews, despigmentation has been perceived historically as “a punishment of God”. Jeffrey, the black white one, has seen how his life changed, how wrecked its identity in the middle of oversight and fear, before re-borning as “a new man".

His family is native of Barbados, in the West Indie. The sister of his grandmother also lost her ebony color and she went condemned to isolation. “The time of the superstition has not gone”, says Jeffrey. “Those ancient fears are still here for illnesses like leprosy, and also for vitíligo, for some inoffensive spots”.

Not so inoffensive, to be honest. “The pain is not physicist, is morale and affects the integrity of the human being”. He speaks now in third person, because now himself has become another one. “I am dramatically different”. He has been submitted to sessions of phototeraphy during a year. With ultraviolet rays and pills of melanina, trying to revive the color that has dull. The black returns to the surface, but only in form of spots. “Spots of color”, says. “It couldn't go back. My White body was full of large black spots. It was worse remedy that illness. All my hopes went broken in pieces”.

Metamorphosis was more difficult to accept because Jeffrey belonged to the exclusive world of the fashion and beauty. “I was model of Giorgio Armani in New York. At the begining, maked up the spots, but I couldn't continue hiding the
illness that advanced so fast. I saw myself forced to renounce my career”. Yesterday he was a quoted object of the worship to the appearance, and today counts himself among its victims. “Is certain that the people continues looking at me. Perhaps more still than before. But no longer is a matter of the same type of looks. No longer there is desire in them, but nausea and an insane curiosity”.

Their anonymous eyes are fixed to his body. “In the street, in the subway, looks of wondering, looks of fear that return against me. I have become an exception. It seems that people fears to be contaminated. I note an aggressive fear. They perceive me like a provocation and, at times, they adopt a defensive attitude. Some friends, with the ones that worked as model, now ignored me. As much as I told them that it was me, Jeffrey, the same one, they were set apart of me. ‘¿How are you able to look at in a mirror?', they told me. During those years I lived in the middle of a nightmare”.

“The most painful is to be felt marginalized. Not to have sense of belonging. I could not identify myself with no known group of individuals. It made me feel like a remote block, alone”. Those sensations took him to his childhood. Like in a countdown.

His father is American and Jeffrey grew, with his two sisters, in the white community of Boston, in Connecticut. “I was not white, but neither black. At 13, I stayed a long season in Sweden. And there I felt the same looks of fear, inquired. I felt then the same feeling of difference that I'm feeling today. I already exercised the same fascination”.

As the original color of his skin goes disappearing, he keeps enclosing in himself the same. Withdrawn, he hides his injury. During months he has lived “a time without end”, he says. He was not able to leave that situation. His father was the one that took the initiative.

“You don't have election. You have to accept yourself”, he said. “If this it is the worse thing than could happen to you in your life, you are a lucky person”.

And Jeffrey, little by little, went exploring himself deep inside. “I only had an obsession: to return to give sense to my existence”. This way, he learned to accept to that another one to be. As if the second one guided to the first. He's now ready able to explain this strange freedom in his jail. "My skin got changed, but I still remain the same. I am fully the same one. I had to die in some way, to lose me in the white of my body to be back in myself, to know at last who I was, to experience the simple fact to be. I renounced to the processing with ultraviolet rays and to any introspection and obliging. I refused to be the victim of myself and to contemplate my own disaster”.

Andrea shares Jeffrey's life 16 years ago. She's the one that encourages him to choose life. “He had to be happy to be able to do happy to the others”. Andrea endured the descent to the hell, the depressions and the renunciations. “In spite of my rage, of my bad humor, she was stood by my side. I do not know if I would be able to surpass this test without her help. But I will not consecrate our love with a son. We are not going to have children. I have too much fear for the possibility that the same thing happens to them. I am 43 years old and I can't be sure that my children could be as strong as I had to be”.

“During the first 30 years of my life I was surrounded by a material welfare that keep myself sleeping. Many times I was egotist and was in love with myself. I was floating in something like a galaxy, seduced by illusions. Suddenly, I woke up of my dream. The drama I had to live contributed the sense of the tragic thing and, therefore, of the happiness also. Today I know that to be well does not means not to be ill. I know, for my own, that the beauty is not what is not ugly. No longer I confuse happiness with satisfaction. I have returned stronger and more sensitive before the others and before its defects. We are slaves of the modern divinities: the beauty and the welfare. This slavery makes the people get inhuman. Today, I am more free”.

In spite of all, he carries his anguish on. “I have suffered so much time… The day that I understood the nature had done its way and that its steps were irreversible, it was when I left myself to be carried for the river of life. And no longer I have time for the people's murderous looks”. Although he keeps the consequences of that suffering in his eyes, which are always wide open.

Jeffrey has recovered his passion for theater and literature, that he studied for more than 20 years at the University of Yale. And he reads as fast as he is able the large works of the classics, above all, the writers of the XIX century. His idol is the poetess Emily Dickinson. “Sometimes I go through an ecstasy state, and experiment an immense appetite of knowledge”. Since four years ago earns the life with a restaurant, Bongo, that opened with his friend Cyntia in the heart of Manhattan. The place is like a bond with the black and mysterious Africa.

His once brown, even complexion is now mottled with pale patches around his eyes and mouth, along his nose and on his ears; his arms, shoulders and chest are speckled and blotched. "I'm a black man turning white on television and people can see it," says Thomas, an anchor and entertainment reporter for the local Fox Broadcasting Company affiliate. "If you've watched me over the years, you've seen my hands completely change from brown to white." Thomas has vitiligo, a disorder in which pigment-making cells are destroyed. White patches appear on different parts of the body, tissues in the mouth and nose, and the retina. "There is no cause. There is no cure, and it's very random," Thomas says. "I could turn all the way white or mostly white."

As many as 65 million people worldwide have the disorder, including up to 2 million in the United States. Few people, outside medical professionals and those with the disease, had heard the term "vitiligo" until Michael Jackson revealed in the early 1990s that the disorder was behind his skin turning brown to white. It's not fatal, but experts say vitiligo robs people of self-confidence, evokes ridicule and unpleasant stares, and pushes some into unforced seclusion. The 40-year-old Thomas says that's not where the disorder needs to be. He openly talks about vitiligo and how it has affected his life and career, and has written a book about his journey titled "Turning White: A Memoir of Change." Along the way, Thomas says he's met others with the disorder and has become a celebrity spokesman for the Columbus, Ohio-based National Vitiligo Foundation.

Vitiligo attacks the soul and psyche, foundation executive director Robert Haas says. He uses a combination of creams and makeup to cover the growing patches of skin — which he calls devoid of color — on his face, hands and arms. Viewers, co-workers and, for years, his basketball buddies, were none the wiser. Only family members and those closest to him knew the secret he had kept since age 25. Thomas first noticed a change after getting a haircut while working in Louisville He looked in a mirror and thought the barber had nicked him. A closer look revealed a pale spot, about the size of a quarter.

Even though Thomas uses makeup to conceal his skin discoloration, he realized the vitiligo was becoming more obvious when he couldn't hide it from a preschooler during a story about a playground. His two-toned hands frightened the girl, who began to cry. Thomas finally agreed to tell his story on television in November 2005.