Speckled.

Byline: Rebecca Mead PHOTOGRAPHED BY MARILYN MINTER

Whether there's just a spray across the nose or constellations on the body, freckles are striking--if not always welcome.

Lawful heart, did anyone ever see such freckles?" These were the words of Matthew Cuthbert, the grandfather figure to one of literature's most celebrated freckle-faces, Anne of Green Gables. Anne's freckles are hardly the most unwelcome thing about her: The premise of the 1908 novel is that Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert have sent to an orphanage in the hopes of adopting a strong young boy to help around the farm. Instead, they take receipt of Anne, who is scrawny, accident-prone, and ultimately irresistible in spite of her flaws, dermatological and otherwise.

Freckles, in life as in literature, are usually perceived as unwelcome. Emerging in childhood, they are considered to be an indication of youthful innocence. But they also have pejorative associations. Caliban, the villain of Shakespeare's The Tempest, is a "freckled whelp." Anne Elliot, the heroine of Jane Austen's Persuasion, fears that a widow named Mrs. Clay has romantic designs on her father: "Mrs. Penelope Clay had freckles, and a projecting tooth, and a clumsy wrist," notes Elliot, skeptically. Freckles are taken to be a marker of inferior social station, suggesting that their possessor adheres to a moral code as lacking in clarity as his or her complexion.

Little wonder that freckles are typically thought of as a liability. Katharine Hepburn was once described in a Time magazine profile as "a collection of fine bones held together by freckles." When Julianne Moore, the very freckled actress, published a children's book called Freckleface Strawberry (Bloomsbury), the heroine of which suffers the same taunts about her looks as Moore did as a child, the book was presented as a defense of speckled beauty. Even so, Moore made it clear that she would rather be clear-skinned. "One of the points of the book is that things you don't like about yourself sometimes don't change, and sometimes you still don't like them," she said on Today : hardly a statement of Freckled Pride.

The scientific name for freckles is ephelides, and their color is produced by melanin, which is generated when epidermal cells called melanocytes are exposed to sunlight. In people who are genetically predisposed to freckling, the skin's effort at self-protection is evident in spotty bursts of melanin. Freckles are usually associated with people with fair, pale skin and red hair (the disappearance of the freckles of Lindsay Lohan has been watched ...