Barbara Justus, age 10, of Visalia, California, for her question:

Why do redheads get so many, freckles?

Many of Andy's penpals rate freckles among the problems of the world. If they looked around and beheld the world of nature with an honest eye, they might change their minds. The prettiest lilies are speckled with freckles and so are many beautiful birds. So is the handsome leopard.

Andy himself was bothered by freckles during his growing years. Being, of course, a pooka type pixie, his youth lasted through several thousand years    or so he says. This is too long to be stuck with any problem. If you cannot grow out of it, you either solve it or learn to live with it   cheerfully. Andy's freckles refused to fade and ages ago he learned to like them. He too is one of those redheaded characters that tend to get more than their fair share of speckles. Often he remembers poor Cleopatra who had only one brown freckle. She regarded it as a beauty spot. Or so he says. He also claims that his old friend Madame Pompadour, who rarely went outdoors, bemoaned her lilywhite skin. She added a couple of artificial beauty spots to improve her face.

Outdoors, the summer sunbeams are still giving away crops of beautiful brown freckles for free. They are most generous with the customers who have fair, light skins    the blondes and the redheads. All of us, of course, have the same type of human skin that comes in layers. The thin top layer is the epidermis. The top part of the epidermis is a dry layer of dead cells which flakes off all the time. The epidermis also contains live cells as does the derma layer of skin below the epidermis. Much of the work of the skin is done by the active derma layer.

Unlike the epidermis, the derma has many nerves and tiny blood vessels. It also is embedded with oil making glands that keep the skin soft and with sweat glands to cool us off in the hot weather. The derma also contains roots for growing hairs. But the freckle making dye called melanin is found in the lower epidermis, a little bit above the scene of all this activity. Some people have more of this brown melanin than others. It tints their skins with coffee or  chocalate color or even with ebony black. Pale, fair people have less melanin and their skins are tinted pinkish by the small blood vessels near the surface.

Melanin is sensitive to sunlight. A bright sunbeam can coax the brown dye in the skin of a fair person to come up to the surface. There it paints a brown spot that shows up beautifully against the pale skin background of a blonde and redhead. If the paleskin person is lucky, he or she gets crops of brown speckles and freckles on the nose and cheeks, the shoulders and arms, the hands and legs.

The time to gather yourself a batch of natural beauty spots is the summer season, now in progress. The place is outdoors where fingers of light coming straight from the sun can touch your bare skin. But like all good thins, sunbathing has a list of be¬wares. Start the job gently in the spring, when last year's freckles have faded from your pale skin. For the first few days, let the sunbeams touch your skin for only 10 minutes at a time. Otherwise you may get a blistering sunburn instead of a healthy tan bedecked with beauteous freckles. Soon you can increase your sunbeam periods to half an hour, then to an hour and longer.