The heavy cost of light skin

by Joan Baxter

The use of bleaching creams to lighten complexions seems to have reached epidemic proportions in Mali, despite widespread education campaigns.

Women who refuse to bleach often find themselves regarded as second class citizens.

A woman who did not bleach her skin said she is often not offered a chair at baptisms, and is asked to make herself scarce when group photographs are taken at marriages.

A quick survey shows there are more than 100 bleaching products available on the market in the capital, Bamako.

Sold under brand names such as Marie-Claire or Diana, the products come from Morocco, Nigeria, the United States or Saudi Arabia.

Dermatologists estimate that more than half the women in Mali are now using these creams to lighten their skin. These products are costly and often cause pain and blemishes.

So why are so many women in Mali using them? The answer is simple, according to one Malian woman singer: The creams make her white, and impart a certain charm.

But Malian physician Dr Ali Gindo finds bleached skin anything but charming.

"They are just burning themselves," he says. "It's painful and it's awful."

Dr Gindo says bleaching can cause skin cancer and the poorest people are the most at risk, because the cheaper the product, the more dangerous it is.

But he says it is not just poor women are bleaching their skin.

"We have also people who are well educated like lawyers, writers or professors, or people on the TV - and this is a real problem because if people who are leaders of opinion bleach themselves, you can imagine how deep the problem is."

Many of the women who use these products told me they do so because Malian men prefer women with bleached skin.

But male musician Al Hassan Soumali disagrees.

"I don't think Malian men like bleached women," he says. "It's better for Malian women to change their minds."

Source:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/718359.stm

Have they forgotten that she is in actual fact a BLACK WOMAN????

The blonde wig may be throwing us off, but Rihanna is on the cover of British Vogue’s November 2011 issue and she’s looking much lighter.

It could be the actual lighting on set, it could be that we’ve gotten used to her wearing a fire engine-red wig, or it could be that someone forget to tell Vogue’s retoucher that Rihanna is in fact black.

What do think? Chime in the comments and help us figure it out. 

Skin lightening in beauty magazines is an all too common practice. At this point it’s just a question of how severely a person will be lightened. ELLE did it to the most beautiful woman in the world most recently, they’ve transformed Gabourey Sidibe into a much lighter cover girl. L’Oreal whitewashed Beyonce, too.

There’s a thriving skin lightening beauty industry too and that one can be dangerous. In 2003, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a professor of neurophysiology and neurology at Harvard Medical School questioned why it was mostly women who were dealing with increased rates of mercury poisoning in places like Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and even in the Southwestern United States

"In every case, clinical questioning revealed that the women had used skin-whitening creams — many for years. In other words, these women had tried so desperately to whiten their skin color that they had poisoned their bodies by applying mercury-based “beauty creams.”

Ninety percent of the women entering border clinics in Arizona with mercury poisoning were Mexican-American, and they like their Mexican counterparts had been using skin-whitening creams such as “Crema de Belleza-Manning,” which is manufactured in Mexico. These skin-whitening creams contain mercurous chloride, which is readily absorbed through the skin. Saudi, African, and Asian women were also using these skin-bleaching chemicals in a tragic attempt to change their appearance to that of white women."