It has been running underground for generations. Then the beauty industry made it legitimate. Now it’s a thriving multibillion-dollar business. Supported mainly by blacks with huge self-image problems, the money is made in the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, the United States, Britain and many other countries where there are people with dark skin.
But last week, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a ban on over-the-counter sales of skin-lightening products, saying possible health risks cannot justify their being sold without a prescription.
The creams typically contain a drug called hydroquinone, which is a possible carcinogen. It also is linked to a skin-disfiguring condition that causes your skin to thicken, along with the appearance of tiny bumps and grayish-brown spots. The disfiguration may appear even after short-term use of the creams. While the actual risk of the drug is unknown, the agency said the products should be restricted to prescriptions.
Studies on rodents show only “some evidence” that hydroquinone may cause cancer. However, the drug’s link to a disfiguring condition has been widely documented in black women and men in South Africa, Britain and the United States since 1975.
Now the United States is proposing that all skin-bleaching products – prescription and over-the-counter – be considered new drugs. In other words, manufacturers would have to request approval to sell them and could do so only with a doctor’s note.
The skin-whitening industry has been booming with sales of bleaching products. According to some psychologists, white people are spending money on tans, while some black women as well as black men are spending big bucks to lighten their complexion. It is just about trying to look good.
Others argue that internalized racism and self-contempt have caused blacks to accept degrading and negative images associated with blackness, compelling them to over identifying with Eurocentric standards of beauty.
While skin whitening is one of the most obvious forms of negating blackness, most discussions focused on hair styles, chemical processes that are used to straighten hair, colored contacts and cosmetic surgery that alters distinctive features like the nose and lips.
But the skin-bleaching creams are still sold and used today. The products often promise to fix everything from pimples to pigment. The ads show beautiful black models that appear to be blessed with flawless “light” skin and make overwhelming claims on product labels and in advertisements. It’s a subliminal message of: “Yes, I am closer to white, more desirable and better.”
I am glad the FDA is proposing this ban. But just how much importance do blacks put on differences in skin color?
A few years ago “brownin’” became a popular term in Jamaica for blacks with light skin. And according to a Washington Post story, teenage girls set their minds on becoming brownin’ and took up “bleaching,” by coating their faces with layers of illegally imported skin cream containing steroids, or using less expensive homemade concoctions that produce the desired whitening effect.
The controversial phenomenon was said to be rooted largely in a belief among Jamaica’s poor that a lighter complexion may be a ticket to upward mobility, socially and professionally, as well as to greater sex appeal. “When you are lighter, people pay more attention to you. It makes you more important.”
Authors of “The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African-Americans,” define the “color complex” as “a psychological fixation about color and features that leads blacks to discriminate against each other.”
Through an examination of intergenerational skin color politics among women self-identified as Creole in New Orleans, the book illustrates manifestations of skin-color politics at levels far more dysfunctional than the definition of “color complex” suggests.
The voices of three generations of Creole women serve as testimony of the degree to which skin color has come to signify privilege, beauty, value and identity. It also illustrates how skin color prejudice and discrimination has been rationalized into a sense of rightness and social order.
Cosmetic products to bleach dark skin have also found an ever-growing market on the African continent. In countries like Mali and much of Central Africa, these dangerous products have reached a disturbingly high demand.
Although skin bleaching has been called an affront to black dignity, it has remained popular. Doctors in Africa report an alarming increase in patients seeking treatment for skin disorders, some of them irreversible, caused by excessive use of the steroid products or abrasive homemade applications that usually contain toothpaste mixed with a facial cream.
The hunger for bleaching creams may be simply a trend of beauty. Like many American and European women are obsessed by their weight or wrinkles, an obsession in Central and West Africa is skin color.
“The trend may have started through racist ideas,” said an African sociologist, “but I do not think most women are conscious about that today.”
Meanwhile, the desire for “fairness” in skin color has now become a worldwide public health issue.
