Here’s What You Don’t Know About Pregnancy and Preventing Stretch Marks

When you are pregnant, you can use as many stretch mark creams as you want. However, you may just not altogether prevent pregnancy stretch marks. When you’re four months pregnant, your body will go through a fast growth cycle. If you’re blessed with the right genes, you may not have pregnancy stretch marks at all if you practice proper health care and use pregnancy stretch mark creams. But for majority of women, the factors listed below will tell if they should be ready for pregnancy stretch marks.

1. Genes: If the women in the pregnant woman’s family (e.g., mom, sister, grandmom) had stretch marks, she will have stretch marks too.

2. Own history: Pregnant women who’ve had stretch marks in the past (pre-pregnancy) are definitely going to develop stretch marks while pregnant. Those stretch marks may also look longer during pregnancy and succeeding ones.

3. Quick weight gain: If you find yourself putting on weight rapidly in the early months of pregnancy, you will likely see stretch marks by the fifth month.

4. Taking care of health: Women who don’t practice proper health care (e.g., regular exercise, good nutrition and drinking lots of water) are apt to develop pregnancy stretch marks.

5. The color of your skin: The less pigmented your natural skin tone is, the more likely you are to get stretch marks.

When Pregnancy and Stretch Mark Prevention Don’t Leave You Stretch Mark Free

The good news is that stretch marks are virtually harmless. They don’t cause health consequences — minor or serious — and they aren’t known to trigger pain. They may be a little more given to retaining moisture and dryness, resulting in occasional itching.

Obviously, as the stomach has the most severe, abrupt expansion in most pregnancies, it is also the location that is typically hardest hit by stretch marks. But pregnancy can also cause fast skin expansion in other areas of the body, not just the belly. Stretch marks are likely to develop in the arms, breasts, hips, buttocks and thighs.

Pregnant women with light skin tend to have reddish stretch marks. If you have dark skin, your stretch marks are going to have the opposite color of your skin tone. The stretch marks can range from pink to dark purple.

Don’t think that your stretch mark blues are over once you give birth. You may continue to develop stretch marks after giving birth or the ones you already have may look even worse since your body is going to go on going through fast changes in terms of size.

However, all is not lost if you end up with stretch marks. Over time, some or most of those pregnancy stretch marks will lighten. Unless your weight gain keeps on after giving birth, the pregnancy stretch marks will probably have already lost most of their coloring after about six months. When you are no longer breastfeeding, your obstetrician may recommend a stretch mark product called Barmon Stretch Mark Cream. It should not be used before your baby is off of breast milk.