What do Mandy Moore, Cindy Crawford, Eva Mendes, and Marilyn Monroe have in common? They all have beauty marks that have accompanied them to stardom. A beauty mark is what makes some celebrities and some people in day to day lives more memorable and more attractive. But is having a beauty mark a blessing or a curse?

For those who are not familiar, beauty marks are basically a dark facial mole that has been considered attractive time and time again by society. But wherever it may be located on one's face, a beauty mark might not be so pretty when it's cancerous.

Melanoma, a cancer that develops from the pigment cells present in the skin, can often be mistake as a beauty mark or as a simple mole.

That is why celebs like Khloe Kardashian have their potentially cancerous moles removed from their body - to relieve them of the impending doom these moles may have.

Generally, melanoma looks like an asymmetrical mole with uneven borders. It may also have two or more shades of black, brown, red, white, or blue. Other signs that a beauty mark or a mole is a melanoma is when it changes in color, it increases in size, thickness, or shape, it changes in texture, if it's larger than a pencil eraser or 6 millimeters, or if it itches, hurts, or bleeds, BodyAndHealth.Canda.com warned.

Now that its appearance has been determined, it's important to know what factors increases the risk of having this skin cancer. MedicineNet reported that factors that raise the risk for melanoma are having a Caucasian ancestry, having fair skin, light hair, light-colored eyes, having a history of sun exposure, having more than a hundred moles, and having close blood relatives with melanoma.

One simple way of reducing the odds of getting melanoma is to avoid excessive sun exposure, more importantly so for kids as they get the most exposure to sun.

When one does suspect that a beauty mark or a mole maybe cancerous, seek a doctor as treatment of for it only involves removing 1 centimeter or less than an inch of the normal tissue around the melanoma. However, for deeper and more advanced cancers, more extensive surgery may be needed.