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Skin bleaching and lightening products have been linked with exposure to skin cancer, skin thinning and kidney and neurological problems, to name a few risks, but this has not stopped women from doing anything in their power to look lighter.
In a video that has been circulating on social media and viewed more than a million times, a woman is seen in a tub of water, with another using some instrument to peel off her skin. The water changes colour the more the skin is peeled off.
The woman doing the peeling says: “As you can see, it’s very fast. You can see now it’s peeling off and this is December period, it’s very, very effective. The result is instant. Can you see this? It works just for 30,000 naira. The skin peels off immediately and you get whitening immediately.”
The video has left social media users in shock, as some warn against lightening skin products.
Then KwaZulu-Natal health MEC Dr Sibongiseni Dhlomo’s department ran an anti-bleaching campaign encouraging people in the province to reject all “colonial” notions of beauty.
He said at the time: “Over decades we have seen people blemished and disfigured especially among the African and Indian groups due to the use of skin lighters. Wrong notions were being promoted to the effect that to be black, especially if you were particularly dark, was loaded with negative stereotypes. The implication was that natural physical traits of blackness were defective; whiteness was now the norm for blacks to emulate.
“Several products, promising miraculous transformations, were then manufactured and marketed specifically to the black community. Consequently, many black women and black men have mutilated their bodies and have even died because they used products containing harsh chemicals that promised peace of mind in a bottle.”
He further pleaded with law enforcement authorities to ensure illegal products were taken off the shelves and destroyed.
Some of the effects of skin lightening and bleaching products were skin cancer, making yourself susceptibility to skin infections, skin thinning, uneven skin tone with increased pigmentation, stretch marks, increase in appearance and thickness of skin vessels, increase in hair growth at sites of application, ochronosis (irreversible greyish pigmentation) and kidney and neurological problems (from mercury).
A shocking 2018 AFP report revealed that African mothers had reached a point of bleaching their babies’ skin.
Nigeria’s Dr Isima Sobande had dismissed this as an urban myth before witnessing it herself.
At a health centre in Lagos, a mother brought in a two-month-old infant who was crying in pain.
“He had very large boils all over his body,” the soft-spoken 27-year-old Nigerian told AFP. “It seemed like they weren’t normal.”
The baby’s mother explained that she had mixed a steroid cream with shea butter and slathered his skin with it in order to make it whiter.
“I was very appalled. It was distressing,” said Sobande.
For many Nigerians, it is a “standard procedure,” a gateway to beauty and success, she said.
“It’s a mindset that has eaten into society. For a lot of people, it’s the path to getting a good job, having a relationship.”
Skin lightening is popular in many parts of the world, including South Asia and the Middle East.
But medical experts say that in Africa — a continent where regulations are often lax or scorned — the widening phenomenon is laden with health risks.
Cultural watchdogs, for their part, see it as the toxic legacy of colonialism.
Africa is experiencing a “massive trend of increased use (of skin bleaching), particularly in teenagers and young adults,” said Lester Davids, a physiology professor at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
“The older generation used creams — the new generation uses pills and injectables. The horror is that we do not know what these things do in high concentrations over time in the body.”
Where statistics about Africa’s skin-bleaching industry exist, they are often old or unreliable.
But evidence from the range of products, suppliers and services points to a continent-wide market that may number tens of millions of people and possibly more.
In Nigeria alone, 77% of women — by extrapolation, more than 60 million people — are using lightening products on a “regular basis”, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in 2011.
(Additional reporting by AFP)
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