Lagos, Nigeria - After carefully washing her face, legs and arms, Taiwo Solomon vigorously rubs cream over her body. She is meticulous and makes sure she covers her entire face. Soloman, 32, is bleaching her skin. She believes fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.

This has been a daily routine for the past 15 years. Now several shades lighter she says her new skin makes her feel more beautiful and confident.

“Bleaching just makes me feel special, like am walking around in a spotlight,” she told Al Jazeera. “I am not seeking to be totally white, I just want to look beautiful. I cannot stop using the lightening agents,” she adds.

Solomon is not alone. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 percent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products, the world’s highest percentage. That compares with 59 percent in Togo, and 27 percent in Senegal. The reasons for this are varied but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want "white skin".

In many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and are believed to be more successful and likely to find marriage.

It's not only women though who are obsessed with bleaching their skins. Some men too are involved in the practice.

Conceptions of beauty

Lightening creams are not effectively regulated in Nigeria where even roadside vendors sell tubes and plastic bags of powders and ointments from cardboard boxes stacked along sidewalks in market districts. Many of the tubes are unlabelled as to their actual ingredients.
 
In a market in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital, business is booming for shops selling skin-lightening products. Both local and imported products line the shelves of Rashida Lawal’s cosmetics shop.

"About 90 percent of my clients come asking for skin whitening products," she told Al Jazeera. "I sell it to them and give advice on what product is best for them and how to use them."

She says most of her customers are in a great haste to lighten their skin.

“Taking the color of your skin to different colour has to be gradual. It's not something you decide one day that 'I want to be fair, I want to be like Michael Jackson and you become Michael Jackson all of a sudden'. That is why we have to advise them first before selling it to them” said Lawal.

Rashida and her staff also mix different ointments and creams for customers “depending on the desired level of lightness”.

Famous Nigerian Musician Femi Kuti says the use skin-lightening products have given rise to their own terminology.

“When the bleaching propaganda got so negative, they had to come up with toning. Bleaching sounds too hard, now it’s toning. I don't bleach, they say, I tone!”

“They think bleaching is gege,” he told Al Jazeera, using a Nigerian term for cool.

Femi attributes skin bleaching to a feeling that foreign products and images must, by definition, be good. 

“An African will prefer to be called John-Philip. If you said your name was Chukwu Emeka Afongkudong they will say you are from the village. You are backward. How can you have such a name? We really look down on our culture and heritage instead of being proud of it,” he laments.

Dangerous consequences 

Skin bleaching comes with hazardous health consequences. The dangers associated with the use of toxic compounds for skin bleaching include blood cancers such as leukemia and cancers of the liver and kidneys as well as severe skin conditions.

Hardcore bleachers use illegal ointments containing toxins like mercury, a metal that blocks production of melanin, which gives the skin its colour, but can also be toxic.

Ayobode Williams, a medical doctor, says the skin bleaching agents have both internal and external effects on those who use them.

“Systemically it causes things like kidney failure because of the mercury in some of the products and it also causes eczema, skin pigmentation among a host of other infections,” he told Al Jazeera.

Dr Williams warned that sustained use of bleaching agents could cause even cancer.

Yet few seem to pay attention to these dangers. For those who bleach, staying black is not beautiful at all.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2013/04/20134514845907984.html

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Look what the lady in the 2nd pic has done to herself! Trying to become white!!!

I'm proud of my skin
Black and Bold
I'm made of Black

Magician1503:
I'm proud of my skin
Black and Bold
I'm made of Black

Black and proud here too!

Why do these people bleach? Million dollar question. Nigerians need to chill a bit.

77 percent of nigeria women bleach?!thats quite high

Black isn't just a colour, it's an attitude. Embrace it!!!

Antoinne:
Why do these people bleach?

Taiwo Solomon provided the answer:

She believes fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. Bleaching just makes me feel special, like am walking around in a spotlight,” she told Al Jazeera. “I am not seeking to be totally white, I just want to look beautiful. I cannot stop using the lightening agents

I heard about this from Aljazerra and I think BBC a few years ago about bleaching in Nigeria, other African countries, countries in Asia(ex. India) and south america(ex. Brazil). I think the reality is that skin bleaching is the negative effects of colonialism in Africa sadly and it will take awhile before Africa comes to terms with it and address it then finally reject it. The funny part of all about this is that most of the famous Nigerians in the media and entertainment industry are dark skinned and dark brown black Nigerians who are good looking so it's funny at times that these women bleaching don't appreciate what they have but as I said before colonailism left a nasty affect in Africa and until that affect is wiped out skin bleaching will continue. I think those pictures of black african women who have skin damage as a result of bleaching is a good way to address it to black african women and some men that if they continue they will look a mess in the future. America did that with their anti-smoking agenda, they kept showing adds and commercials against smoking: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anti+smoking+commercials
and guess what the commercials worked cause smoking reduced in America over the decades, maybe Nigerian/Black Africans need to start doing that.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usR-uTFc30g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5mfFbA2r2g

nerodenero:
Black isn't just a colour, it's an attitude. Embrace it!!!

True talk bro! Africans and especially Nigerians, need to be proud of their skin colour.

anonymous6:
I heard about this from Aljazerra and I think BBC a few years ago about bleaching in Nigeria, other African countries, countries in Asia(ex. India) and south america(ex. Brazil). I think the reality is that skin bleaching is the negative effects of colonialism in Africa sadly and it will take awhile before Africa comes to terms with it and address it then finally reject it. The funny part of all about this is that most of the famous Nigerians in the media and entertainment industry are dark skinned and dark brown black Nigerians who are good looking so it's funny at times that these women bleaching don't appreciate what they have but as I said before colonailism left a nasty affect in Africa and until that affect is wiped out skin bleaching will continue. I think those pictures of black african women who have skin damage as a result of bleaching is a good way to address it to black african women and some men that if they continue they will look a mess in the future. America did that with their anti-smoking agenda, they kept showing adds and commercials against smoking: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=anti+smoking+commercials
and guess what the commercials worked cause smoking reduced in America over the decades, maybe Nigerian/Black Africans need to start doing that.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usR-uTFc30g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5mfFbA2r2g

You are very correct. Reminds me of the drama,'The Blinkards', where Africans were ridiculed by the playwright for copying the British culture and throwing away their original African culture and heritage!

nedu2000:
77 percent of nigeria women bleach?!thats quite high

So You didn't know all this while?

Rapmoney:
So You didn't know all this while?

77 is large oh.....i don't know how true it is

Rapmoney:
You are very correct. Reminds me of the drama,'The Blinkards', where Africans were ridiculed by the playwright for copying the British culture and throwing away their original African culture and heritage!

I never seen blinkards but sounds interesting but the summary of the drama is spot on because it reminded Africans to appreciate their culture, so maybe we need dramas to show africans to appreciate themselves