Chelsea Women goalkeeper Hedvig Lindahl spoke to the club's official website about Vitiligo, a skin condition she suffers from, in order to raise awareness of the issue...
Lindahl was just five years old when she noticed patches of her then-tanned skin turn abnormally white. Fast forward three decades and the Swedish international is in the swimming pool of the team hotel in Montpellier, where the Blues are on a pre-season training camp, and organising a special photo with her team-mates.
‘Someone mentioned something about their tan! It’s nice in some way that I’m excluded from the tanning competition but I wanted to show that it’s completely fine to be that pale,' Lindahl says.
Lindahl has Vitiligo, a long-term condition characterized in most cases by the skin losing its pigment and colour, causing white patches to occur.
‘I was super tanned when I was a kid and then I got some scars on my knees, as you do when you’re a child, and I started to notice white patches around the scars,' she explains. 'Then I went on this long process of losing the pigment in my skin. Between the ages of five and 18 I had brown patches remaining all over me, and then when I was 20, it was all white. All over my body now, I don’t have any pigment. I am also losing the pigment in my hair.’