In conventional, skin detection methods using for skin color definitions is based on prior knowledge. By experimentation, the threshold value for dividing the background from the skin region is determined subjectively. A drawback of such techniques is that their performance is dependent on a threshold value which is estimated from repeated experiments. To overcome this, the present paper introduces a skin region detection method. This method uses a histogram approximation based on the mean shift algorithm. This proposed method applies the mean shift procedure to a histogram of a skin map of the input image. It is generated by comparing with the standard skin colors in the $C_bC_r$ color space. It divides the background from the skin region by selecting the maximum value according to the brightness level. As the histogram has the form of a discontinuous function. It is accumulated according to the brightness values of the pixels. It is then, approximated by a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) using the Bezier curve technique. Thus, the proposed method detects the skin region using the mean shift procedure to determine a maximum value. Rather than using a manually selected threshold value, as in existing techniques this becomes the dividing point. Experiments confirm that the new procedure effectively detects the skin region.