What is male cellulite and why does it appear?

Yes, you heard right, not only women suf­fer from this skin phe­nom­e­non.

It begins with “tse” and ends with “llulite.” What is this?

It is a com­mon skin phe­nom­e­non that most often occurs in women after ado­les­cence — 85–98% of women over 20 have it to vary­ing degrees. Cel­lulite also occurs in men, but less fre­quent­ly, and appears due to a defi­cien­cy of male hor­mones.

Orange peel

As you know, with cel­lulite, the skin looks like orange peel or cot­tage cheese. All this beau­ty man­i­fests itself most strong­ly on the hips and but­tocks.

Accord­ing to the degree of sever­i­ty, there are sev­er­al degrees of cel­lulite: at zero there is no cel­lulite, and at fourth, the skin has a char­ac­ter­is­tic orange peel-like tex­ture with pro­nounced raised and sunken areas.

It will help to bet­ter under­stand what cel­lulite is

Microanatomy of the skin

The out­er­most lay­er of skin is the epi­der­mis, and under­neath is the der­mis. The next lay­er of tis­sue is the hypo­der­mis, it is loose, and this is where cel­lulite occurs — in places with a large amount of fat deposits, most often on the back of the thigh and but­tocks. The con­nec­tive tis­sue of the hypo­der­mis con­tains lob­ules with cham­bers of fat cells.

  1. In women, these lob­ules are locat­ed ver­ti­cal­ly, and in men at an angle. Fat cells in men expand hor­i­zon­tal­ly, not upward, and there­fore, even with the same lev­el of sub­cu­ta­neous fat, women have more notice­able pro­tru­sion of fat cells through the skin than men.
  2. Also, men have thick­er lay­ers of epi­der­mal and der­mal tis­sue in the thighs and but­tocks, and this pre­vents cel­lulite from “appear­ing.” The dif­fer­ent skin struc­ture between men and women is due to dif­fer­ences in hor­mones between the sex­es.

Why then does cellulite occur in men too?

It has been proven that men born with a defi­cien­cy of male hor­mones often have sub­cu­ta­neous fat tis­sue sim­i­lar to that of women, and are there­fore prone to the appear­ance of cel­lulite.

To make the mechan­ics of the process of cel­lulite man­i­fes­ta­tion clear­er, imag­ine a mat­tress that is filled with water and placed on stones. The sur­face of the mat­tress imme­di­ate­ly deforms in places where it comes into con­tact with stones. It’s the same with cellulite—protruding fat cells lead to the for­ma­tion of depres­sions in the skin.

This “bulging” process has been con­firmed:

  • mag­net­ic res­o­nance imag­ing,
  • sonog­ra­phy (high-fre­quen­cy sound waves to pro­duce images)
  • skin biop­sy.

It has also been proven that cel­lulite appears due to sagging/weakening in the con­nec­tive tis­sue areas of the der­mis.

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