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Sometimes people are born with strange marks on their body. It might be there, but be so light that you never notice it and one day you decide to sit out in the sun and the birthmark takes over that patch of skin where it sat silently for years. What I also find strange is the fact that sometimes a person will have a birthmark in a particular place and then they find out that an ancestor or even a close relative has the same mark in exactly the same area. I have seen this myself on people. I remember one person had a mole on their neck and their aunt had a mole in the exact same shape in the same location. Maybe this wasn't really strange, but when you saw the two of them together, you couldn't help but feel a little weird.

Sometimes these things look like an object. One person had a heart shaped birthmark on their arm. It was almost like having a tattoo. Here is one for you, I guess you have heard of people that believe that they lived in a past life and seem to know many facts about someone that they couldn't possibly have known? Well in some rare instances this is accompanied by a strange birthmark that was also found on the person that they believe that they were, in a previous life. Hey it doesn't get much stranger than that, does it? This has been seen on some children. Most children have birthmarks of one sort or another when they are born, but most of them go away, at least this is what Better Health claims. It some cultures they are called Stork Bites. Wow, keep that bird away from me. A birthmark can be many different colors, the most common are pink, bluish and strawberry. No one really knows the cause of these marks. If a child is born with a strawberry birthmark, he has a 90 to 95% chance that it will disappear by the time he is nine years old. Then there are all those other type of things that mark the skin, such as moles, freckles, cafe au lait spots and port wine stains. I guess a good example of the port wine stain would be Mikhail Gorbachev, he has one on top of his head and it has been seen by the entire world.

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A few hundred years ago, birthmarks could be deadly. An example of this took place in a village called East Lothian in Scotland. Apparently the people that lived there believed that there were witches living in and near them and went to the Earl and complained. I don't know whether he believed in witches or not, but he was afraid that the people were going to move so he conducted a witch hunt. Unfortunately for some people, the method used to determine who was a witch and who wasn't was "Witch Marks" and yes, some people had them because they were just common birthmarks. This resulted in their being burned at the stake. There is supposedly a way to recognize the anti Christ when he is born and that is by a birthmark and the birthmark will be in the shape of 666.

Sometimes birthmarks are called beauty marks and are considered sexy. An instance of this was on the face of Marilyn Monroe. Some say that the mark wasn't real, but painted on, while others insist that it was the genuine article. Some women would add a beauty mark to their faces in the Court of Louis XV. Did you ever notice when you see a movie about this period that someone always has a beauty mark on their face?

One man claims that his birthmarks are exactly in the shape of the Orion Constellation. Ancient claims were made about people who bore this type of birthmark. Another person claims to have the same thing but on his leg. To this day some people are scared by certain birthmarks that look too much like other things. I think that this is rather silly since no one can help the marks that they are born with. Not only that, but some birthmarks look like different things to different people. It is like looking up into the night sky and seeing the stars. Different people see different shapes there. The ancient people looked into the sky and some where along the line, they saw the constellations,.I challenge anyone that doesn't know where they are and their shapes to look up in the sky and see them.

Some people that had birthmarks in the middle ages and were suspected of being witches were given another chance. They had their birthmarks pricked with a pin and if they didn't bleed or feel pain, they were said to surely be witches. An entire industry developed over this. Some people began to specialize in the pin pricking task and developed special thin tools that they inserted, not only into birthmarks, but also into things like moles and scars. At least one of them developed a hollow thin retractable blade, because he wanted to make sure that there WOULD BE NO BLEEDING OR PAIN, so he could say he discovered a witch. This guy was a real saddest.

Some types of birthmarks or skin marks, including moles and scars, can be rectified by plastic surgery, while others seem to be more permanent, such as the port wine stain. People used to believe that birthmarks were a sign of your destiny. We no longer believe in such things, at least most of us don't. We have become much more scientifically oriented. I guess contrary to the saying that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, in this case it is a good thing, or we would still be burning many of our neighbors at the stake. Yes we have come a long way.