It wasn't until her tan disappeared that Karin van der Valk noticed the suspicious red patches on her left cheek.

"I thought it was sunburn, but when my tan was all gone in the winter, I realized the red patches were quite prominent," she said.

It took her a while to discover the cause of the redness. "I also have asthma and allergies, and tend to break out in red patches when I'm suffering an attack," she said.

It was the network of visible blood vessels on her face that bothered Rita Edwards the most. As a frequent blusher, she was accustomed to having "high color" on her face, but this was more than she could bear.

"They made my face look purple-red," she said. "I also had dry, bumpy skin, almost like acne."

Even though she doesn't like to wear makeup, Rita tried foundations and creams to cover her blemishes, redness and blood vessels. "But they just couldn't be covered," Rita said.

"People would ask me what was wrong when my face got red," she said.

Red was not a new color to Kathleen Shoup. Her fair Irish complexion had blushed and flushed most of her life. But then as a roller dance skater, her cheeks began to look particularly red hot.

It was after she started skating competitively at the age of 48 that Shoup noticed her redness was worse. "My long workouts caused red blotches and they took longer to go away than before," she said. "I finally went to the dermatologist because I had a bad rash across my face," she added. The dermatologist diagnosed the rash as rosacea.

Diane Hilmo was rather proud of the "natural" color of her face, a little redness on the cheeks that gave her a healthy look. She never imagined it was something to worry about or that it could possibly be the symptom of a chronic skin disorder.

"I had seen pictures of people with rosacea, faces with red rashes," she said. "But I didn't look anything like those pictures, so I ignored it."

Susan Stover thought she was going through another streak of bad luck with her complexion. Since the age of 12, she had battled periodic outbreaks of acne and pimples. Now, at the age of 37, she found herself again in the midst of a fight for clear skin.

Yet something was different this time. "I was bright red with pimples on my cheeks, nose and chin. I thought it might be due to my makeup," she said.

When Jose Vega Aquino of Puerto Rico started using a popular cream to treat his acne, instead of seeing an improvement in his skin, his face became inflamed with red, sore pimples.

"There was itching, dryness and redness," Aquino said. "Any gesture, even a laugh, was very painful."

He discontinued using the acne treatment but the redness and pain persisted. "I stopped using my contacts and tried to hide behind my glasses. I felt terrible," he said.

In a single day, Dollie Timpe's life changed. It was shortly after she underwent minor surgery to remove a lesion from her face. Timpe, 84 years old, woke up one morning, the day before she was to return to her dermatologist for a follow-up appointment, with a strange and painful breakout on her face.

"There was a lot of redness and a lot of big pimples," Timpe said. "It just made me sick." It was especially difficult, said Timpe, because she was accustomed to having gorgeous white skin all of her life. "Everyone wanted to know my formula for perfect skin," she said.

At first Bennie Chung, a 23-year-old woman from Hong Kong, had no clue why her skin appeared to be so sensitive, flaring up from time to time. She thought it was a condition she inherited. Her 50-year-old mother, in fact, had the same red face.

But as the condition worsened, she knew she had to find some answers. "We thought we might be suffering from an allergy," said Chung, who normally had very fair skin. "We bought a lot of different cosmetics to fight against the way we looked."

To this day, Virginia Cox is not sure how she got her first copy of Rosacea Review. One day, it simply seemed to arrive in her mailbox.

"I was shocked," Cox said. "I asked several of my friends if someone had submitted my name, but they said 'no.' Now I know it was really a miracle."

That's because Cox started reading the newsletter and ultimately recognized in herself the disease it described. In her mid-50s, Cox had developed a redness on her cheeks and nose. Yet despite the similarities to rosacea, she initially ignored her gut feelings.