Nigeria has the world's highest percentage of women
using skin lightening agents in the quest for
"beauty".
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.
"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. "
- Femi Kut, Nigerian Musician
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.

m.aljazeera.com/se/20134514845907984

Happy bleaching!

I did not need to read the article. Last year, I had gone looking for a sunscreen but they didnt have one without a whitening effect.If I n3ver used a sunscreen b4 then,I'd think it is how sunscreens work.