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The search for lighter skin
01/01/1900 00:00 - (SA)
Simon Denyer
Nairobi - As they celebrate their engagement, a Congolese man boasts about his fiancee's beauty and declares himself the luckiest man in the world.
Seconds later, a lighter skinned woman enters the room and all heads turn towards her.
"What a beauty. What skin colour," the awe-struck fiance declares. All the men in the room flock to the woman's side, leaving the wife-to-be forlorn and alone at her table.
The advertisement for Rico Lemon Plus cream promises African women lighter skin, and with it the admiration of their menfolk.
But women across the continent are finding the dream turn into a nightmare as they ruin their skin in an ill-starred quest to bleach it.
Most of the popular creams and soaps contain chemicals like hydroquinone and mercury, the latter a powerful poison the use of which has long been outlawed in skin-care products.
Taking advantage of lax regulations and ever laxer law enforcement, experts say Western companies are flooding Africa's markets with creams which could never be sold at home.
Destroying the skin's natural protection
The products, which usually carry no health warnings, bleach by breaking down skin melanin. But they also destroy the skin's protective outer layer in the process, dermatologists say.
Eventually, the skin starts to burn, itch or blister, becomes extremely sensitive to sunlight and then turns even blacker than before. Prolonged use can damage the nerves or even lead to kidney failure or skin cancer, and so prove fatal.
Creams containing small concentrations of hydroquinone - two percent or less - have been licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration, but only to treat small areas of hyperpigmentation, spots and blemishes.
"It should never be applied near the eyes," the FDA says in its ruling - advice which most African women ignore. Instead the strongest creams on the market are mixed together, and sometimes applied to the whole body.
"They must be used for a very short time, well monitored, prescribed by a doctor, and on a small area of the skin," says Kenyan dermatologist Melani Miyanji.
"If used beyond the indication, there are very many side effects which are not just skin deep. They can affect the whole system. Some of them lead to death."
Mary's story
Twenty-year-old Kenyan Mary Ngonyo started using bleaching creams four years ago, on a friend's recommendation.
"Her skin was so smooth, I wanted to look like her - she changed her face. I wanted my face to change too," Mary said.
She was happy with the results until her cheeks turned red and painful, especially in the sun. Her eyes became sensitive to bright light. Then uneven black patches showed around her eyes.
"Many of my friends avoid me now. They say I look like an old woman. Guys don't want to see me, so I just stay at home."
In parts of Nigeria, bleached skin is a status symbol. In some Tanzanian tribes, paler skin can hike the "bride price".
"There's a very strong belief that lighter skinned women are more beautiful in Africa. That is something that is very deep rooted," said Irene Njoroge, a Kenyan beauty consultant.
Many blame advertisers, who have long used white or light-skinned people to sell their products in Africa.
Colonial trauma
"These advertisements and billboards sell the image that success equals light skin, the people that are moving ahead are light skinned," Njoroge said.
But Muanza Kabangu, a psychiatrist working with Africans in Paris, says the roots of the concern with light skin may go back to Africans' first contact with white men and a white Christ.
"Africans must have internalised the fact that the white man represented perfection and so, today, they reproduce everything they had to bury in their unconscious minds for centuries," he said.
Awareness of the dangers is not new, but its spread has been slow. "Your face go yellow, your yansh (backside) go black," sang Nigerian Afrobeat idol Fela Anikulapo Kuti in one 1970s hit song. "Yellow fever...you de bleach, ugly thing."
In May, Kenya's Bureau of Standards banned the sale of more than 80 products containing chemicals like hydroquinone and mercury. It said the products "have continuously been used inappropriately on the whole body for skin lightening purposes".
Similar bans were put on the statute books in Nigeria in the 1970s, South Africa in 1992 and Tanzania in 1996 - but the products keep coming in illegally as the demand is still there.
Today, many street stalls, chemists and supermarkets in Kenya still sell banned soaps like Mekako and Jaribu - both containing mercuric iodide - as well as Rico and Amira - which contain large amounts of hydroquinone.
Mekako and Jaribu packets list the manufacturers as Anglo Fabrics (Bolton), but the British company said it had sold manufacturing rights for the products 15 or 20 years ago, declining to say to whom.
Officials at Rico Skin Care Ltd in Britain said its creams contained only two percent hydoquinone, but added that there were many stronger fake Rico products on the market.
South Africa's Dermatological Society says at least 30 percent of women there bleached their skin 10 years ago, but these days the proportion is much lower.
"People have accepted the whole idea of a black woman being beautiful," said Qhawekazi Dyantyi, a 22-year-old sales girl in Johannesburg. "Before the measure of a beautiful woman was white. We never had black role models. Now we have plenty."
- Reuters
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