Soft growths on the neck

These are small soft growths, skin-coloured or slightly darker, attached by a thin stalk. They appear mainly on the neck, armpits, eyelids, under the breasts and in the groin — that is, where skin rubs against itself or against clothing. They are benign lesions and do not turn into anything else.

The distribution already says a good deal about the mechanism: friction is the factor that favours them, which is why they tend to be more numerous where skin folds are more marked. They appear with age, increase in pregnancy, and in people who develop many of them it is reasonable to look at the general metabolic picture too, since being overweight and disturbances of glucose metabolism are fairly often accompanied by a greater tendency to form them.

There is one point that should be made before any treatment, and it is the one patients are most often disappointed by: removing a skin tag eliminates that lesion, not the predisposition to form them. New ones can appear in the same places, and this is not a sign that the removal was done badly. It is why it makes sense to remove them when they are a nuisance — catching on necklaces, irritated by a collar, inflamed if twisted — rather than as an attempt to resolve a tendency.

Finally, it is worth being explicit about one thing: they should not be cut off or tied off at home. Besides bleeding and the risk of infection, there is a less obvious reason: not everything that protrudes from the skin is a skin tag, and removing one yourself means eliminating a lesion without ever having known what it was.