The wolof expression “Khess Petch” means “all white.” It is also the name of a brand new skin whitening cream that has been advertised throughout Dakar in the past few days. The large placards in the streets of Dakar promise that the "Khess Petch" cream will brighten your skin in 15 days. To support this claim, the advertisements show "before" and "after" pictures of a woman using the “miracle product.”
The cream, however, was quickly being condemned on social media. An online petition urging the Ministry of Health to end the advertising campaign launched on September 8 and gathered more than 1,000 signatures in four days. The cream’s critics, who include dermatologists, warn that the cream contains a strong corticosteroid, clobetasol propionate, an ingredient that dermatologists say should only be prescribed by health professionals in cases of serious skin diseases.
Unlike those countries where skin whitening creams are illegal, like Europe and the U.S., skin whitening in Africa and Asia is not taboo — quite the contrary, in fact. Being fair-skinned in Senegal means being beautiful and successful. TV presenters, celebrities, and even political women who whiten their skin continue to perpetrate this fad, despite the well-known harmful effects of these products.
"We are used to seeing adverts for skin-lightening, but when we first saw these adverts for Khess Petch we were really scandalised. We decided to act," said Aisha Deme, manager of an online events website in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
"Society is constantly telling us that fair-skinned women are beautiful – in the media, on TV – and Senegalese women have started to believe it," Deme added. "So we want to show that dark-skinned women are really beautiful, and that natural black skin should be celebrated."
Deme is co-ordinating a campaign called Ñuul Kukk– which means "pitch black" in local language Wolof – and has attracted thousands of supporters on Facebook.
"There are expensive face-lightening creams which are less dangerous, but products like Khess Petch are very cheap and very dangerous – they are deliberately targeted at women in the villages and the poor urban areas," said Deme. "Even when they discover the side-effects and want to stop using the creams, they find they cannot stop. It's only when you stop that the skin changes and begins to become completely burned."
If black is beautiful, why do black women bleach?
Some black women bleach and bleach until it gets to the point where their skin begins actually begins to peel off with black spots developing all over their bodies.
However, it is important to draw our attention to the fact that it is not only black women who bleach; black men bleach as well. Many women and men spend so much money on expensive body lotions to make them look whiter. The real question is what factors motivate black people to bleach? Many people say black is beautiful, yet why do some black women and men want to look white?
A few years ago Merrick Andrew published an article. Merrick shared some interesting thoughts about why black people bleach. According to Merrick, there is a general perception that the fairer you are, the more successful you become, either socially, economically and romantically.
For instance, about 7 out of 10 men are most likely to pick up a girl of fair complexion compared to a one of a darker complexion if both of them stand the chance of being equally beautiful.
An 18 year old teenager was interviewed and she was asked why she uses skin lightening creams. Her reply was, “white people get the better things in life, yes. You have a lot of advantages when you are white.” This is funny. If a black woman were bleach, does it make her a white person?
A study in Senegal found that women associate fair skin tone with elegance, beauty and a higher social status. And in the Tanzanian study, many participants felt that their lighter skinned peers have higher status, income, education, job opportunities, as well as more friends. These women are not deluded; misguided, definitely, but not deluded. They see the evidence around them. It is not surprising then that some “darker skinned people are often envious of those with lighter skin and attempt to achieve the same status by engaging in skin-lightening practices.”
A recent study by the University of Cape Town hints that one woman in three in South Africa bleaches her skin. The reasons for this are as varied as the cultures in the country but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want “white skin,”.
One such woman is musician Nomasonto “Mshoza” Mnisi. Now several shades lighter, she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.But skin-lightening is not just a fascination and obsession of women, Congolese hair stylist Jackson Marcelle says he has been using special injections to bleach his skin for the past 10 years. Each injection lasts for six months.
“I pray every day and I ask God, ‘God why did you make me black?’ I don’t like being black. I don’t like black skin,” he says. Mr Marcelle – known as Africa’s Michael Jackson – says his mother used to apply creams on him when he was young in order to make him appear “less black.”
“I like white people. Black people are seen as dangerous; that’s why I don’t like being black. People treat me better now because I look like I’m white,” he adds.
Bleach To The Rhythm
According to the World Health Organisation, 77% of Nigerian women use skin lightening products on a regular basis, as do 59% in Togo, 35% in South Africa, 27% in Senegal and 25% in Mali. These products are also used in Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Gambia and Tanzania.
There is some evidence of a system of privilege, discrimination and hierarchies based on social meanings attached to skin tone in Africa before contact with Europeans in the 16th century, but part of the process of creating an European empire was to define the European self in contrast to everyone else. How could you justify dominating and enslaving other people if you didn't tell yourself you were better in every way? Europeans placed themselves at the pinnacle of the human race and dark-skinned at the very bottom. To be black was to be primitive, backward, inferior, dirty, ugly, evil, devilish, deviant, corrupt and unappealing, while to be white was to be virtuous, beautiful, refined, humane, intelligent and godly.
By the nineteenth century, spurious scientific "evidence" was being produced to support this dichotomy, thereby providing an ideological justification for colonialism. It also provided a means of control: tell the lighter-skinned black Africans that they are more beautiful, intelligent and industrious than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, and soon you will create divisions that make control easier.
According to Wikipedia, colonial mentality occurs "when a foreign colonial or imperial power is too strong to be effectively resisted, the colonised population often has no other immediate option than to accept the rule of the foreigners as an inescapable reality of life. As time progresses, the colonised indigenous people-natives would perceive the differences between the foreigners and themselves, between the foreigners' ways and the native ways. This would then sometimes lead the natives to mimic the foreigners that are in power as they began to associate that power and success with the foreigners' ways. This eventually leads to the foreigners' ways being regarded as the better way and being held in a higher esteem than previous indigenous ways.
People who embrace the bleaching syndrome seem to internalise the negative messages about Blackness brownness and so desire to be like the dominant other. Skin-lightening is a problem, but it's only really a sign of much deeper inter-related issues, namely, self-hatred, a race-based identity crisis, and the internalisation of western-created cultural ideas that are inimical to the mental health of people of colour everywhere. At least with hair weaves and fake accents (other manifestations of an identity crisis), no one is in danger of kidney damage, or damage to the nervous system, or skin rashes, skin discolouration and scarring, or reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections. And, rather than the practice dying out as African economies boom, it is reportedly on the rise (partly thanks to increasing urbanization).
Our thinking seems to be: the darker we are the more "African" we are, which wouldn't be a problem if some of us didn't think there was something wrong with being African. Why do we think that? This internalised form of racism is an invisible presence in our psyches, and some of us don't even realise it's a factor in how we perceive ourselves and others. Thus, for instance, black guys (not only in Africa) think their attraction to light-skinned girls is just a matter of taste, and some who lighten their skin can't articulate why they do so beyond saying that it's just prettier, as though skin lightening were akin to putting on lipstick. It's a matter of identity, self-worth and self-acceptance, that, in some respects, is even existential.
Skin lightening, a practice that has affected many women of colour and has a powerful historical basis in African American communities. Pre-emancipation, lighter-skinned slaves were given less degrading work and were valued more highly by white slave owners Following the abolishment of slavery, lighter skinned black people comprised the “Negro elite” in American society. African American women began carefully construct a physical appearance that mirrored western concepts of beauty largely through straightening their hair, but equally as important in bleaching their skin. Skin lightening occurs in Asian and Latino cultures as well. As often happens with issues of appearance, women faced the greatest burden of this pressure to be light.
Skin bleaching advertisements directed at women of colour often carried images of white-looking women. Ads insisted that black women could increase their social popularity and sexual desirability with a “whitened complexion” through products like Snow White Bleaching Cream. Readers were inundated with promises of lighter, brighter, whiter skin, along with warnings that make-up cannot hide a “poor” complexion and “dark colour problems.”
The the idea of lighter being better is actually reinforced by some parents today, but the most powerful way this message is reinforced is through consumer culture and global mass media. The mass media form for us our image of the world. The images they present and how these images are presented subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear. Even our images of ourselves is greatly influenced by what media shows us about our own group. People who lighten their skin and those who associate light skin with positive virtues and dark skin with negative ones aren't stupid. They just don't have the psychological resources to withstand and deluge of images they are presented with every day. Thousands of images from magazines, TV, film, ads, and the news, all equating light skin with beauty, affluence, happiness and success, and portraying dark-skinned black people as aggressive, unintelligent, criminals, crude, lazy, etc.
Alek Wek (South Sudan/UK), Ajuma Nasenyana (Kenya),and Eunice Olumide (Nigeria) are just two of the tiny handful of high-profile dark-skinned models on the international stage, but as Eunice says, “… it is still rare to see a very dark-skinned model on the cover of a magazine. I’d love that to change.”
Most of the foreign media and movies consumed in sub-Saharan Africa are from America and Europe, so we take in these images and mimic the practice of colourism in our own ads and magazines. We see which black women are considered beautiful by the mass media, we see that the black models and singers who are making it are mostly lighter-skinned – Rihanna, Beyoncé, etc., we see which actresses get to play love-interest roles and which ones get relegated to bit parts, and we see which ones make it to the A lists. We echo the message we receive and perpetuate the system that excludes dark skin from the spectrum of beauty.
We see pictures of Obama and we see don't just see a black man, but a mixed-race, light-skinned black man. Some argue that the beauty ideal is shifting from white to a more cafe-au-lait-complexion, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that women like Beyoncé, Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez now routinely top some of these "most beautiful" lists. But what seems to have happened there is that the previous practice of promoting only white women as beautiful was simply not sustainable when a significant proportion of the global consumer population was clearly non-white, so the parameters were widened to include a handful of non-white women who are not too many skin tones away from being white.
For dark-skinned black people, being excluded in this manner says black is not beautiful, and the epitome of beauty is a light-skinned person, so this is what you should aspire to if you're dark-skinned. It says it from every billboard, magazine cover, TV ad, packaged product on the shelf, and film thousands of times a day. Every day. So we continue to be socialised into accepting light skin (and straight hair) as defining standards of black beauty. We continue to succumb to - and create - images that reinforce a psychologically-damaging message
If women in Africa are more susceptible to this than men, it is merely because women are judged much more heavily on the basis of appearance. Men are more likely to be considered valuable when they have wealth, education and other forms of human capital, while women are considered valuable when they are physically attractive, even if they lack other capital. Flick through those magazines and you'll find that the women featured are almost always a few shades lighter than the men. Black men don't need to be light-skinned to be worth paying any attention, but black women do.
A Global Multi-Billion Dollar Industry
Skin lightening products account for nearly half of the cosmetics industry and are in high demand in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
The market for skin lightening products is projected to be worth $10bn in global sales by 2015, driven by new markets in Africa and sustained growth in Asia-Pacific, the skin lightening market offers huge room for expansion although the chemicals used in them can cause health defects such as scarring of the skin, or even cancer.
The Surinamese take a different approach to skin lightening. Instead of chemicals, some parents advice their kids to marry a white person to "tone down the black". Such parents have been known to pinch and massage the nostrils of their babies to prevent them from becoming flared. Marry lighter, get better hair and a finer nose.
You will find this sort of thinking among the descendants of city Creoles, the ones who lived close to their previous colonial masters, the Dutch. Interestingly, the descendants of the Lowermang, which means "runaway slaves" remain proud of their culture, traditions, and African roots. They're the ones who still understand the dialect of their forefathers, and would be able to converse with Ghanaians if you dropped them in the middle of Accra today.
In Brazil, individuals with lighter skin and who are racially mixed generally have higher rates of social mobility, and dark skinned people are more likely to be discriminated against. Most South American actors and actresses have mostly European features - light or light-mixed eyes, protruding narrow noses, straight hair and/or pale skin. So there's pressure for dark-skinned Brazilians to lighten their skin, too.
Colonial mentality reigns across Asia, too. On any given day, the poolside of the Yogyakarta Hyatt Regency Hotel in Indonesia swims with pasty, Vitamin-D-deprived European and American flesh. As the Westerners cook themselves brown, a hundred meters down the street, at the Michael Jackson Whitening House, Indonesian men and women pay exorbitant fees to have their dark skin scrubbed, scraped and burned away with exotic chemicals.
Here, in this two-story, art-deco “skincare laboratory,” clients are sold a dream: The promise of brightness, lightness and, eventually — if they continue the treatment for long enough — whiteness.
The Michael Jackson Whitening House is just one of several salons and clinics in this student-filled city of half a million in Central Java that offers skin-whitening treatments. The salons, which are most popular with the city’s wealthy and young elite, offer a more extreme version of skincare that is already commonplace in Indonesia. In supermarkets and drug stores here, major brands offer a vast selection of skin-lightening products, from soap to lotions to “restorative” face masks that promise astonishing results.
“I just feel more beautiful when I’m looking white,” said 21-year-old Dian Pertiwi Sulistianingtyas, who said she visits a whitening salon twice a month for cosmetic lightening facials. “Every day we see these people on television – actors, musicians, people like that – they always look so beautiful, so white!”
Most Indian actors and actresses have light skin, and the Indian obsession with light skin recently reached a new low with a campaign for a product to lighten the skin around your vagina. As a result, the Indian whitening cream market is expanding at a rate of nearly 18% a year. The country's largest research agency, AC Nielsen, estimates that figure will rise to about 25% this year - and the market will be worth an estimated $432m, an all-time high. With the Indian middle class expected to increase 10-fold to 583 million people by 2025, it looks as if things will only get better for the cream makers.
John Abraham, a top Indian actor and model, says: "Indian men want to look better."
And he should know. The market is booming like never before. Launched way back in 1978, Hindustan Unilever's Fair & Lovely is the leader in women's lightening skincare, while Calcutta's Emami group leads the male equivalent with its brand, Fair And Handsome. The company calls this brand - launched in 2005 - the world's number one fairness cream. It achieved sales of $13m in 2008-09 and has Shah Rukh Khan, another Bollywood superstar, as its brand ambassador.
In the West, tanned complexions represent youth and beauty; in China, however, pale, white skin is the hallmark of a glamorous woman. This deep-rooted ideal has been the foundation of the skin-whitening business. Get white" messages are inescapable in this part of the world. Ghostly, white faces fill the scenes of popular Chinese TV dramas. Pale Chinese models peer from the pages of glossy magazines, pout on billboards and in cinema advertisements. And pamphlets with bleached faces jostle for counter space at local department stores. Models tout products such as Blanc Expert, White-Plus, White-Light, Future White Day, Blanc Purete, Fine Fairness, Active White, White Perfect and Snow UV.
"Skin whitening has a long history in Asia, stemming back to ancient China. And the saying 'one white covers up one hundred ugliness' was passed through the generations," says Li Yanbing,
Dale Preston, managing director of retail measurement for consultant Nielsen Greater China, says whitening products are the key segment of the skin care market in China. It makes up nearly 30% of the total skin care market in China. Chinese consumers are big users of facial whitening products, with facial care accounting for over 80% of market.
Euromonitor International, another independent strategy research company, says China's market for whitening products is expected to grow. In its report released this year, L'Oreal was the clear leader in skin care in China in 2010, accounting for 16% overall market share.
Annual sales of L'Oreal China broke the 1 billion euros ($1.35 bn) mark for the first time in 2010, becoming the French cosmetics company's third largest market in the world with double-digit growth for the 10th consecutive year.
Skin To Die For
Would you use a cream or soap that may have the following long-term side effects – skin cancer, liver damage, kidney damage or poisoning?
In 2003, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a professor of neurophysiology and neurology at Harvard Medical School questioned why it was mostly women who were dealing with increased rates of mercury poisoning in places like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even in the Southwestern United States
In every case, clinical questioning revealed that the women had used skin-whitening creams — many for years. In other words, these women had tried so desperately to whiten their skin colour that they had poisoned their bodies by applying mercury-based “beauty creams.”
Ninety percent of the women entering border clinics in Arizona with mercury poisoning were Mexican-American, and they like their Mexican counterparts had been using skin-whitening creams such as “Crema de Belleza-Manning,” which is manufactured in Mexico. These skin-whitening creams contain mercurous chloride, which is readily absorbed through the skin.
Saudi, African, and Asian women were also using these skin-bleaching chemicals in a tragic attempt to change their appearance to that of white women.
Why do we have colour in our skin?
There are three reasons for the colour of our skin:
The cells contained within the dermis and epidermis provide a natural yellow, white colour
Superficial blood vessels provide a blue or red tint determined by oxygen content
Melanin produced by melanocytes scattered within the basal layer of the skin
It is this third point which determines how dark a persons skin is; more melanin production results in darker skin. Melanin has another key function - it plays a major protective role. It is the skins own natural protection from the harmful ultra violet rays of the sun. Without it the skin is extremely vulnerable and we would have to cover exposed skins with sun screen or risk a greater chance of developing skin cancer.
How skin lightening products work
There are two chemicals found in skin lightening products, Hydroquinone or Mercury.
Hydroquinone (C6H6O2) is the biological equivalent of paint stripper or bleach and is a severely toxic and very powerful chemical used in photo processing, the manufacture of rubber and is an active agent in hair dyes.
Mercury in the form of Mercury Chloride & Ammoniated Mercury is carcinogenic. They appear on the list of toxic substances that can only be purchased via pharmacies with prescribed labels of toxicity.
Both products perform a similar process. In the short term they will initially cause the skin to lighten by inhibiting the production of melanin. Without melanin formation in the basal layer no brown pigmentation will be visible.
The long term effects of using skin lightening products
Hydroquinone or Mercury applied to the skin will react with ultra violet rays and re-oxidise, leading to more pigmentation and premature ageing. More product is then applied in an attempt to correct the darker blotchy appearance. These are the beginnings of a vicious cycle. By altering the skins natural structure and inhibiting the production of Melanin, it’s natural protection, the skin is more susceptible to skin cancer. Prolonged use of Hydroquinone will thicken collegen fibres damaging the connective tissues. The result is rough blotchy skin leaving it with a spotty cavier appearance.
Mercury will slowly accumulate within the skin cells striping the skin of it’s natural pigment leaving behind the tell tale signs of gray/ blue pigmentation in the folds of the skin. In the long term the chemical will damage vital organs and lead to liver and kidney failure and mercury poisoning. With high-potency topical steroids used for a long time you can get suppression of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system. And with that suppression you can get these endocrine problems like Cushing’s disease and diabetes.
Long-term hydroquinone use can lead to a paradoxical increased pigmentation of the skin known as exogenous ochronosis. Other serious complications include loss of skin elasticity and impaired wound healing. The use of corticosteroids is associated with ophthalmologic, endocrinologic and cutaneous complications. These include glaucoma and cataracts, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, allergic contact dermatitis, eczema, atrophy of the skin and bacterial, viral and fungal infections. Murcurials have been banned in some countries, including South Africa and Europe after they were recognized as toxic. They have proven “to be nephrotoxic via the absorption of mercury through the skin following repeated applications. Mercury poisoning may manifest in a range of symptoms including psychiatric, neurological, and kidney problems.
Consumers become dependent on skin-lighteners, because of increased re-pigmentation. They feel pressure to continue using skin-lightening creams over long periods in order to maintain their newly acquired lighter skin tone. An attempt to discontinue use may also result in an “immediate flare-up of unsightly rashes,” further discouraging users to discontinue use. Due to the stigma shrouding the use of skin-lightening products, users suffering from withdrawal signs and symptoms are more likely to rebound and continue use rather than to seek medical attention.
The list of side effects of the steroid corticosteroid is long. The most serious is Cushing's disease, a malfunction of the adrenal glands leading to an overproduction of cortisol. Other side effects include:
Damage to vital organs
Liver and kidney failure
Increased appetite and weight gain
Deposits of fat in chest, face, upper back, and stomach
Swelling
Slowed healing of wounds
Osteoporosis
Cataracts
Acne
Muscle weakness
Thinning of the skin
Mood swings
Stretch marks across the body
Onset of diabetes, or worsening of existing diabetes
High blood pressure
Glaucoma
Reduced growth in children
increased risk of infection
Hyperglycemia
Insulin resistance
Depression
Colitis
Hypertension
Erectile dysfunction
Hypogonadism
Hypothyroidism
Amenorrhoea
Retinopathy.
Increased risk of cancer
Increased risk of adrenal gland problems
Symptoms characteristic of low-dose mercury exposure for fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of methylmercury is impaired neurological development.
Methyl-mercury exposure in the womb, which can result from a mother using whitening products that contain methyl-mercury, can adversely affect a baby's growing brain and nervous system. Impacts on cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills have been seen in children exposed to methyl-mercury in the womb.
''America is the only country in the world where you can be born poor and black and die white and rich'' RIP Michael Jackson
The cream, however, was quickly being condemned on social media. An online petition urging the Ministry of Health to end the advertising campaign launched on September 8 and gathered more than 1,000 signatures in four days. The cream’s critics, who include dermatologists, warn that the cream contains a strong corticosteroid, clobetasol propionate, an ingredient that dermatologists say should only be prescribed by health professionals in cases of serious skin diseases.
Unlike those countries where skin whitening creams are illegal, like Europe and the U.S., skin whitening in Africa and Asia is not taboo — quite the contrary, in fact. Being fair-skinned in Senegal means being beautiful and successful. TV presenters, celebrities, and even political women who whiten their skin continue to perpetrate this fad, despite the well-known harmful effects of these products.
"We are used to seeing adverts for skin-lightening, but when we first saw these adverts for Khess Petch we were really scandalised. We decided to act," said Aisha Deme, manager of an online events website in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
"Society is constantly telling us that fair-skinned women are beautiful – in the media, on TV – and Senegalese women have started to believe it," Deme added. "So we want to show that dark-skinned women are really beautiful, and that natural black skin should be celebrated."
Deme is co-ordinating a campaign called Ñuul Kukk– which means "pitch black" in local language Wolof – and has attracted thousands of supporters on Facebook.
"There are expensive face-lightening creams which are less dangerous, but products like Khess Petch are very cheap and very dangerous – they are deliberately targeted at women in the villages and the poor urban areas," said Deme. "Even when they discover the side-effects and want to stop using the creams, they find they cannot stop. It's only when you stop that the skin changes and begins to become completely burned."
If black is beautiful, why do black women bleach?
Some black women bleach and bleach until it gets to the point where their skin begins actually begins to peel off with black spots developing all over their bodies.
However, it is important to draw our attention to the fact that it is not only black women who bleach; black men bleach as well. Many women and men spend so much money on expensive body lotions to make them look whiter. The real question is what factors motivate black people to bleach? Many people say black is beautiful, yet why do some black women and men want to look white?
A few years ago Merrick Andrew published an article. Merrick shared some interesting thoughts about why black people bleach. According to Merrick, there is a general perception that the fairer you are, the more successful you become, either socially, economically and romantically.
For instance, about 7 out of 10 men are most likely to pick up a girl of fair complexion compared to a one of a darker complexion if both of them stand the chance of being equally beautiful.
An 18 year old teenager was interviewed and she was asked why she uses skin lightening creams. Her reply was, “white people get the better things in life, yes. You have a lot of advantages when you are white.” This is funny. If a black woman were bleach, does it make her a white person?
A study in Senegal found that women associate fair skin tone with elegance, beauty and a higher social status. And in the Tanzanian study, many participants felt that their lighter skinned peers have higher status, income, education, job opportunities, as well as more friends. These women are not deluded; misguided, definitely, but not deluded. They see the evidence around them. It is not surprising then that some “darker skinned people are often envious of those with lighter skin and attempt to achieve the same status by engaging in skin-lightening practices.”
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| India Arie |
One such woman is musician Nomasonto “Mshoza” Mnisi. Now several shades lighter, she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.But skin-lightening is not just a fascination and obsession of women, Congolese hair stylist Jackson Marcelle says he has been using special injections to bleach his skin for the past 10 years. Each injection lasts for six months.
“I pray every day and I ask God, ‘God why did you make me black?’ I don’t like being black. I don’t like black skin,” he says. Mr Marcelle – known as Africa’s Michael Jackson – says his mother used to apply creams on him when he was young in order to make him appear “less black.”
“I like white people. Black people are seen as dangerous; that’s why I don’t like being black. People treat me better now because I look like I’m white,” he adds.
Bleach To The Rhythm
According to the World Health Organisation, 77% of Nigerian women use skin lightening products on a regular basis, as do 59% in Togo, 35% in South Africa, 27% in Senegal and 25% in Mali. These products are also used in Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Gambia and Tanzania.
There is some evidence of a system of privilege, discrimination and hierarchies based on social meanings attached to skin tone in Africa before contact with Europeans in the 16th century, but part of the process of creating an European empire was to define the European self in contrast to everyone else. How could you justify dominating and enslaving other people if you didn't tell yourself you were better in every way? Europeans placed themselves at the pinnacle of the human race and dark-skinned at the very bottom. To be black was to be primitive, backward, inferior, dirty, ugly, evil, devilish, deviant, corrupt and unappealing, while to be white was to be virtuous, beautiful, refined, humane, intelligent and godly.
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Lil Kim |
By the nineteenth century, spurious scientific "evidence" was being produced to support this dichotomy, thereby providing an ideological justification for colonialism. It also provided a means of control: tell the lighter-skinned black Africans that they are more beautiful, intelligent and industrious than their darker-skinned brothers and sisters, and soon you will create divisions that make control easier.
According to Wikipedia, colonial mentality occurs "when a foreign colonial or imperial power is too strong to be effectively resisted, the colonised population often has no other immediate option than to accept the rule of the foreigners as an inescapable reality of life. As time progresses, the colonised indigenous people-natives would perceive the differences between the foreigners and themselves, between the foreigners' ways and the native ways. This would then sometimes lead the natives to mimic the foreigners that are in power as they began to associate that power and success with the foreigners' ways. This eventually leads to the foreigners' ways being regarded as the better way and being held in a higher esteem than previous indigenous ways.
People who embrace the bleaching syndrome seem to internalise the negative messages about Blackness brownness and so desire to be like the dominant other. Skin-lightening is a problem, but it's only really a sign of much deeper inter-related issues, namely, self-hatred, a race-based identity crisis, and the internalisation of western-created cultural ideas that are inimical to the mental health of people of colour everywhere. At least with hair weaves and fake accents (other manifestations of an identity crisis), no one is in danger of kidney damage, or damage to the nervous system, or skin rashes, skin discolouration and scarring, or reduction in the skin’s resistance to bacterial and fungal infections. And, rather than the practice dying out as African economies boom, it is reportedly on the rise (partly thanks to increasing urbanization).
Our thinking seems to be: the darker we are the more "African" we are, which wouldn't be a problem if some of us didn't think there was something wrong with being African. Why do we think that? This internalised form of racism is an invisible presence in our psyches, and some of us don't even realise it's a factor in how we perceive ourselves and others. Thus, for instance, black guys (not only in Africa) think their attraction to light-skinned girls is just a matter of taste, and some who lighten their skin can't articulate why they do so beyond saying that it's just prettier, as though skin lightening were akin to putting on lipstick. It's a matter of identity, self-worth and self-acceptance, that, in some respects, is even existential.
Skin lightening, a practice that has affected many women of colour and has a powerful historical basis in African American communities. Pre-emancipation, lighter-skinned slaves were given less degrading work and were valued more highly by white slave owners Following the abolishment of slavery, lighter skinned black people comprised the “Negro elite” in American society. African American women began carefully construct a physical appearance that mirrored western concepts of beauty largely through straightening their hair, but equally as important in bleaching their skin. Skin lightening occurs in Asian and Latino cultures as well. As often happens with issues of appearance, women faced the greatest burden of this pressure to be light.
| Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.  |
| Niki Manji |
Skin bleaching advertisements directed at women of colour often carried images of white-looking women. Ads insisted that black women could increase their social popularity and sexual desirability with a “whitened complexion” through products like Snow White Bleaching Cream. Readers were inundated with promises of lighter, brighter, whiter skin, along with warnings that make-up cannot hide a “poor” complexion and “dark colour problems.”
The the idea of lighter being better is actually reinforced by some parents today, but the most powerful way this message is reinforced is through consumer culture and global mass media. The mass media form for us our image of the world. The images they present and how these images are presented subliminally and yet profoundly affect the way in which we interpret what we see or hear. Even our images of ourselves is greatly influenced by what media shows us about our own group. People who lighten their skin and those who associate light skin with positive virtues and dark skin with negative ones aren't stupid. They just don't have the psychological resources to withstand and deluge of images they are presented with every day. Thousands of images from magazines, TV, film, ads, and the news, all equating light skin with beauty, affluence, happiness and success, and portraying dark-skinned black people as aggressive, unintelligent, criminals, crude, lazy, etc.
Alek Wek (South Sudan/UK), Ajuma Nasenyana (Kenya),and Eunice Olumide (Nigeria) are just two of the tiny handful of high-profile dark-skinned models on the international stage, but as Eunice says, “… it is still rare to see a very dark-skinned model on the cover of a magazine. I’d love that to change.”
Most of the foreign media and movies consumed in sub-Saharan Africa are from America and Europe, so we take in these images and mimic the practice of colourism in our own ads and magazines. We see which black women are considered beautiful by the mass media, we see that the black models and singers who are making it are mostly lighter-skinned – Rihanna, Beyoncé, etc., we see which actresses get to play love-interest roles and which ones get relegated to bit parts, and we see which ones make it to the A lists. We echo the message we receive and perpetuate the system that excludes dark skin from the spectrum of beauty.
We see pictures of Obama and we see don't just see a black man, but a mixed-race, light-skinned black man. Some argue that the beauty ideal is shifting from white to a more cafe-au-lait-complexion, and that this is demonstrated by the fact that women like Beyoncé, Halle Berry and Jennifer Lopez now routinely top some of these "most beautiful" lists. But what seems to have happened there is that the previous practice of promoting only white women as beautiful was simply not sustainable when a significant proportion of the global consumer population was clearly non-white, so the parameters were widened to include a handful of non-white women who are not too many skin tones away from being white.
For dark-skinned black people, being excluded in this manner says black is not beautiful, and the epitome of beauty is a light-skinned person, so this is what you should aspire to if you're dark-skinned. It says it from every billboard, magazine cover, TV ad, packaged product on the shelf, and film thousands of times a day. Every day. So we continue to be socialised into accepting light skin (and straight hair) as defining standards of black beauty. We continue to succumb to - and create - images that reinforce a psychologically-damaging message
If women in Africa are more susceptible to this than men, it is merely because women are judged much more heavily on the basis of appearance. Men are more likely to be considered valuable when they have wealth, education and other forms of human capital, while women are considered valuable when they are physically attractive, even if they lack other capital. Flick through those magazines and you'll find that the women featured are almost always a few shades lighter than the men. Black men don't need to be light-skinned to be worth paying any attention, but black women do.
A Global Multi-Billion Dollar Industry
Skin lightening products account for nearly half of the cosmetics industry and are in high demand in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
The market for skin lightening products is projected to be worth $10bn in global sales by 2015, driven by new markets in Africa and sustained growth in Asia-Pacific, the skin lightening market offers huge room for expansion although the chemicals used in them can cause health defects such as scarring of the skin, or even cancer.
The Surinamese take a different approach to skin lightening. Instead of chemicals, some parents advice their kids to marry a white person to "tone down the black". Such parents have been known to pinch and massage the nostrils of their babies to prevent them from becoming flared. Marry lighter, get better hair and a finer nose.
You will find this sort of thinking among the descendants of city Creoles, the ones who lived close to their previous colonial masters, the Dutch. Interestingly, the descendants of the Lowermang, which means "runaway slaves" remain proud of their culture, traditions, and African roots. They're the ones who still understand the dialect of their forefathers, and would be able to converse with Ghanaians if you dropped them in the middle of Accra today.
In Brazil, individuals with lighter skin and who are racially mixed generally have higher rates of social mobility, and dark skinned people are more likely to be discriminated against. Most South American actors and actresses have mostly European features - light or light-mixed eyes, protruding narrow noses, straight hair and/or pale skin. So there's pressure for dark-skinned Brazilians to lighten their skin, too.
Colonial mentality reigns across Asia, too. On any given day, the poolside of the Yogyakarta Hyatt Regency Hotel in Indonesia swims with pasty, Vitamin-D-deprived European and American flesh. As the Westerners cook themselves brown, a hundred meters down the street, at the Michael Jackson Whitening House, Indonesian men and women pay exorbitant fees to have their dark skin scrubbed, scraped and burned away with exotic chemicals.
Here, in this two-story, art-deco “skincare laboratory,” clients are sold a dream: The promise of brightness, lightness and, eventually — if they continue the treatment for long enough — whiteness.
The Michael Jackson Whitening House is just one of several salons and clinics in this student-filled city of half a million in Central Java that offers skin-whitening treatments. The salons, which are most popular with the city’s wealthy and young elite, offer a more extreme version of skincare that is already commonplace in Indonesia. In supermarkets and drug stores here, major brands offer a vast selection of skin-lightening products, from soap to lotions to “restorative” face masks that promise astonishing results.
“I just feel more beautiful when I’m looking white,” said 21-year-old Dian Pertiwi Sulistianingtyas, who said she visits a whitening salon twice a month for cosmetic lightening facials. “Every day we see these people on television – actors, musicians, people like that – they always look so beautiful, so white!”
Most Indian actors and actresses have light skin, and the Indian obsession with light skin recently reached a new low with a campaign for a product to lighten the skin around your vagina. As a result, the Indian whitening cream market is expanding at a rate of nearly 18% a year. The country's largest research agency, AC Nielsen, estimates that figure will rise to about 25% this year - and the market will be worth an estimated $432m, an all-time high. With the Indian middle class expected to increase 10-fold to 583 million people by 2025, it looks as if things will only get better for the cream makers.
John Abraham, a top Indian actor and model, says: "Indian men want to look better."
And he should know. The market is booming like never before. Launched way back in 1978, Hindustan Unilever's Fair & Lovely is the leader in women's lightening skincare, while Calcutta's Emami group leads the male equivalent with its brand, Fair And Handsome. The company calls this brand - launched in 2005 - the world's number one fairness cream. It achieved sales of $13m in 2008-09 and has Shah Rukh Khan, another Bollywood superstar, as its brand ambassador.
In the West, tanned complexions represent youth and beauty; in China, however, pale, white skin is the hallmark of a glamorous woman. This deep-rooted ideal has been the foundation of the skin-whitening business. Get white" messages are inescapable in this part of the world. Ghostly, white faces fill the scenes of popular Chinese TV dramas. Pale Chinese models peer from the pages of glossy magazines, pout on billboards and in cinema advertisements. And pamphlets with bleached faces jostle for counter space at local department stores. Models tout products such as Blanc Expert, White-Plus, White-Light, Future White Day, Blanc Purete, Fine Fairness, Active White, White Perfect and Snow UV.
"Skin whitening has a long history in Asia, stemming back to ancient China. And the saying 'one white covers up one hundred ugliness' was passed through the generations," says Li Yanbing,
Dale Preston, managing director of retail measurement for consultant Nielsen Greater China, says whitening products are the key segment of the skin care market in China. It makes up nearly 30% of the total skin care market in China. Chinese consumers are big users of facial whitening products, with facial care accounting for over 80% of market.
Euromonitor International, another independent strategy research company, says China's market for whitening products is expected to grow. In its report released this year, L'Oreal was the clear leader in skin care in China in 2010, accounting for 16% overall market share.
Annual sales of L'Oreal China broke the 1 billion euros ($1.35 bn) mark for the first time in 2010, becoming the French cosmetics company's third largest market in the world with double-digit growth for the 10th consecutive year.
Skin To Die For
Would you use a cream or soap that may have the following long-term side effects – skin cancer, liver damage, kidney damage or poisoning?
In 2003, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a professor of neurophysiology and neurology at Harvard Medical School questioned why it was mostly women who were dealing with increased rates of mercury poisoning in places like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even in the Southwestern United States
In every case, clinical questioning revealed that the women had used skin-whitening creams — many for years. In other words, these women had tried so desperately to whiten their skin colour that they had poisoned their bodies by applying mercury-based “beauty creams.”
Ninety percent of the women entering border clinics in Arizona with mercury poisoning were Mexican-American, and they like their Mexican counterparts had been using skin-whitening creams such as “Crema de Belleza-Manning,” which is manufactured in Mexico. These skin-whitening creams contain mercurous chloride, which is readily absorbed through the skin.
Saudi, African, and Asian women were also using these skin-bleaching chemicals in a tragic attempt to change their appearance to that of white women.
Why do we have colour in our skin?
There are three reasons for the colour of our skin:
The cells contained within the dermis and epidermis provide a natural yellow, white colour
Superficial blood vessels provide a blue or red tint determined by oxygen content
Melanin produced by melanocytes scattered within the basal layer of the skin
It is this third point which determines how dark a persons skin is; more melanin production results in darker skin. Melanin has another key function - it plays a major protective role. It is the skins own natural protection from the harmful ultra violet rays of the sun. Without it the skin is extremely vulnerable and we would have to cover exposed skins with sun screen or risk a greater chance of developing skin cancer.
How skin lightening products work
There are two chemicals found in skin lightening products, Hydroquinone or Mercury.
Hydroquinone (C6H6O2) is the biological equivalent of paint stripper or bleach and is a severely toxic and very powerful chemical used in photo processing, the manufacture of rubber and is an active agent in hair dyes.
Mercury in the form of Mercury Chloride & Ammoniated Mercury is carcinogenic. They appear on the list of toxic substances that can only be purchased via pharmacies with prescribed labels of toxicity.
Both products perform a similar process. In the short term they will initially cause the skin to lighten by inhibiting the production of melanin. Without melanin formation in the basal layer no brown pigmentation will be visible.
The long term effects of using skin lightening products
Hydroquinone or Mercury applied to the skin will react with ultra violet rays and re-oxidise, leading to more pigmentation and premature ageing. More product is then applied in an attempt to correct the darker blotchy appearance. These are the beginnings of a vicious cycle. By altering the skins natural structure and inhibiting the production of Melanin, it’s natural protection, the skin is more susceptible to skin cancer. Prolonged use of Hydroquinone will thicken collegen fibres damaging the connective tissues. The result is rough blotchy skin leaving it with a spotty cavier appearance.
Mercury will slowly accumulate within the skin cells striping the skin of it’s natural pigment leaving behind the tell tale signs of gray/ blue pigmentation in the folds of the skin. In the long term the chemical will damage vital organs and lead to liver and kidney failure and mercury poisoning. With high-potency topical steroids used for a long time you can get suppression of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system. And with that suppression you can get these endocrine problems like Cushing’s disease and diabetes.
Long-term hydroquinone use can lead to a paradoxical increased pigmentation of the skin known as exogenous ochronosis. Other serious complications include loss of skin elasticity and impaired wound healing. The use of corticosteroids is associated with ophthalmologic, endocrinologic and cutaneous complications. These include glaucoma and cataracts, hypertension, diabetes mellitus, allergic contact dermatitis, eczema, atrophy of the skin and bacterial, viral and fungal infections. Murcurials have been banned in some countries, including South Africa and Europe after they were recognized as toxic. They have proven “to be nephrotoxic via the absorption of mercury through the skin following repeated applications. Mercury poisoning may manifest in a range of symptoms including psychiatric, neurological, and kidney problems.
Consumers become dependent on skin-lighteners, because of increased re-pigmentation. They feel pressure to continue using skin-lightening creams over long periods in order to maintain their newly acquired lighter skin tone. An attempt to discontinue use may also result in an “immediate flare-up of unsightly rashes,” further discouraging users to discontinue use. Due to the stigma shrouding the use of skin-lightening products, users suffering from withdrawal signs and symptoms are more likely to rebound and continue use rather than to seek medical attention.
The list of side effects of the steroid corticosteroid is long. The most serious is Cushing's disease, a malfunction of the adrenal glands leading to an overproduction of cortisol. Other side effects include:
Damage to vital organs
Liver and kidney failure
Increased appetite and weight gain
Deposits of fat in chest, face, upper back, and stomach
Swelling
Slowed healing of wounds
Osteoporosis
Cataracts
Acne
Muscle weakness
Thinning of the skin
Mood swings
Stretch marks across the body
Onset of diabetes, or worsening of existing diabetes
High blood pressure
Glaucoma
Reduced growth in children
increased risk of infection
Hyperglycemia
Insulin resistance
Depression
Colitis
Hypertension
Erectile dysfunction
Hypogonadism
Hypothyroidism
Amenorrhoea
Retinopathy.
Increased risk of cancer
Increased risk of adrenal gland problems
Symptoms characteristic of low-dose mercury exposure for fetuses, infants, and children, the primary health effect of methylmercury is impaired neurological development.
Methyl-mercury exposure in the womb, which can result from a mother using whitening products that contain methyl-mercury, can adversely affect a baby's growing brain and nervous system. Impacts on cognitive thinking, memory, attention, language, and fine motor and visual spatial skills have been seen in children exposed to methyl-mercury in the womb.
''America is the only country in the world where you can be born poor and black and die white and rich'' RIP Michael Jackson