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.
source 2012 Al Jazeera
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