“Vitiligo essentially is what I hope will be a way for us as humans to redefine skin color,” Colgan said.

Now, she is using art through a nonprofit she started called Tough Skin to promote beauty, self-love, and empowerment. She's a photographer and she photographed Sabrina Harris who is a sister in the vitiligo community.

When the skin disorder vitiligo began stripping pigment from Jasmine Colgan's skin six years ago, she got depressed. In an effort to get more comfortable with her changing appearance, she began taking photos of herself. Then, she says, she got "bored with my skin," and took to social media to contact other people with the condition. Now she travels the country taking their pictures for her blog, Tough Skin. Colgan, who lives in Arvada, tells Colorado Matters the blog's name was inspired by her grandmother.

Jasmine Colgan, 27, travels across the country to meet and photograph people who share her rare skin condition, Vitiligo.

When a photographer in Arvada was diagnosed with vitiligo, a skin disorder that leaves people with discolored skin, her life changed - and at first, not for the better.

A photographer with vitiligo says she's finally made peace with her skin condition after taking to heart the dying words of her grandmother.

African-American Jasmine Colgan says that the condition that has uncontrollably turned her skin a patchy white is the “best thing that ever happened”.

A woman has used tattoos to embrace the condition that saw her dark skin turn white uncontrollably and says it is “the best thing that ever happened” – despite the difficulties it has caused in her love life.

Vitiligo is a skin condition affecting approximately one per cent of the planet's population. That's around 50 million people. Yet, many remain ignorant of the effect it has on people living with it, or the prejudice that they often face. Indeed, there are many who have never even heard of it before.

At a time when questions and controversies over America’s racial past, present and future have highlighted political and social divisions, artist Jasmine Maa Abena Colgan’s life, art and even her body, are a metaphorical—and even literal—subversion of some deeply held ideas about the nation’s history.

Vitiligo is an autoimmune condition targeting select melanocytes in the epidermis producing segmental areas of depigmentation.

A photographer with vitiligo has embraced her look and empowered others with the condition to do so too, thanks to her grandmother’s dying words that she needed ‘tough skin’.

‘The idea for the name of Tough Skin came from my late grandmother when I was diagnosed,’ Jasmine explains. ‘She told me, “you gotta have tough skin”, so I shortened the name for the project.

‘I have always been a documentation photographer, so I incorporated the idea of close shots with my skills.

‘I wanted to go to experience [people’s] culture of living with vitiligo, and I believe the only way to do that is to be in each person’s environment.

If you are an internet savvy vitiligo fighter, you must know what Tough Skin project is. You must be aware of how this project raises awareness of vitiligo through images and creates a world of acceptance for people who look different. But, not many know about the story behind the creation of Tough Skin.