First, let's look at the bad methods of skin whitening. Bleaching the skin with any number of chemicals that affect the pigmentation of the skin may not always have the desired effect.

There are, of course, hundreds of products out there that claim to help lighten your skin color or improve the overall quality of your skin. Some of these products may include one or more of the following - hydroquinone, mercury, arbutin, tretinoin, kojic acid and azelaic acid.

I don't know about you, but those are some pretty scary names. Other methods include lasers, which doesn't sound like it would be too much fun. (I'm sure it's not the type of lasers they use in Star Trek, but still...)

Granted, glutathione has a name just as frightening and intimidating as the others just listed, but it's something that occurs naturally in the body.

Glutathione is a "master antioxidant" that resides within cells of all living tissue. It's what handles and routes toxins in the body to other antioxidants like Vitamin C and Vitamin E that operate outside the cell.

In simpler terms, it's something you want to have in the right amounts in your body to help combat cell damage.

One of the side effects of increased amounts of glutathione in a person is that it causes skin whitening. It does this by inhibiting (blocking) melanin. Blocking melanin causes the pigmentation (color) of your skin to become lighter.

When this knowledge was first discovered, there weren't any methods available to easily increase the body's level of glutathione. Not a lot was known in the beginning. Recently, though, it's been found that taking L-glutathione (a reduced form of glutathione) orally can help increase the body's glutathione levels. It's not as effective as delivery directly into the bloodstream, but taken orally in the right doses, it's been shown to have an effect not only on skin color and the overall health of the skin.

So now we have a way to whiten skin and keep it healthy at the same time. If you've been considering skin whitening, you now have an option that will improve your skin tone, make it more uniform in color and also help keep your body healthy in other ways.

I don't know about you, but this seems like a win-win situation. Glutathione isn't a cure all, but it is a safe and healthy method of skin whitening. If that's something you're considering, for whatever reason, be sure to find out more about glutathione and how it might help you.