I overheard my mother saying one day that a person with tatoos was "wild" We had many feral cats in our barn and my grandmother was always telling me to leave them alone, they were "wild" and would scratch me. I became convinced that people with tatoos would scratch, hiss and bite if you got too close to them.

sarah_bellum

My mum used to call my freckles beauty spots when I was little, and I always thought they were called that - I thought they must make me more beautiful!

Julie

When i was littl emy mom told me thats zits were something you get if you lie to someone...And eversince then i never lied because i always thought i would get them and whoever i saw with a lot of sits i thought that they were huge liars!... :)

Lindsey

When I was young, every summer I would get very tanned and my hair would get blond streaks (normally med. brown) and I believed that if one summer I was out in the sun too much I would turn into an african-american with bleach blond hair.

Robyn

My grandmother is big. When I was little, I was in the bathroom with her when she was going to the bathroom. I looked at her leg, and said, "that looks like bread" (her cellulite) I thought it was crumbs of bread inside her body!

don't want to embarass anyone

When my sister was really young, before I was born even( I think ) She had seen the show "the cosby's" and that had been the only place where she had seen dark skin. So one day while at the mall with my mom, a few people with black skin walked by and she yells "look mom! cosby's!"

My sisters sister.

we live in a small, remote town in Europe. When we were little, my mum always had au pair girls from canada to look after us.

one of them was an african canadian girl. At that point, my little brother (he was 3, at the time) had never seen anyone that dark before, so he thought her skin colour was make-up and tried to rub it off...

Anon

i used to think men could also get stretch marks....until my younger stepsister told me women only get it....

...i dont think i was a bright kid

casey malcolm

I was a tom-boy and had scraped knees for about 2 years strait because of it. When I first heard that we only have 7 layers of skin I got so upset because I thought I had already used up all of mine and that the skin on my knees would never grow back

Amelora

i used to believe that the brown birthmark on my arm was a coffee stain that had been there to long to be washed off.

julia hibbert

i didnt really understand different races when i was little, and when we were in the car, i saw a black person and was amazed and told everyone in there i saw a brown coloured man. my brother who was 5 years older, went on to say hed seen a whole black person before, me and my sister were amazed and kept trying to find a black man.

iwanttobegerman

when i was little, when my tooth fell out, i thought if i peeled back my gum, there would be like green flannel underneath. i also thought that when i got an ulcer it was a little football stuck in my mouth..

iwanttobegerman

I thought I could get a tan by sitting in front of the fireplace. I used to look in the mirror and see that the freckles had occured. I was quite old when I realized the fireplace wasn`t going to help my easter tan much.

Anon

When I was young, I used to share a bath with my older brother. He had a large mole on his chest, and he told me it was there because I had bitten him! I felt so guilty. I then thought that all moles were bites, and used to really pity some people. My brother milked it for years (Me, not the mole). He had it removed recently. I hope it hurt!

Andy C

I used to believe that if you drank coffee while you were pregnant you would have a black child and if you drank milk you would have a white child.

Anon

I used to get teased about my freckles at school. One day I told my aunt that I did not want my freckles anymore. She told me that she too had many when she was a child and she had got rid of them by putting powder on her face. I spent weeks putting powder on my face thinking they would until finally my parents made me tell them the reason of my strange habit.

Trevor

my sister in her childish innocence studied an african american man waiting behind my mother in line at the local market near our house. she couldn't have been more than 5 or so squirming in her seat in the shopping cart when she couldn't wait any longer. she asked the man "when you take a bath how do you know when you're clean?" making the connection that he couldn't see dirt against his dark skin like she could. the man just laughed at her honesty and said "when the water turns brown i know i'm clean" while my mom turned ten shades of red in embarrassment.

jirkstore

every mole you have is marking a lie

loo loo pup

I used to believe that "colored" people were multi-colored, like a stained-glass window!

Anon