"Not white" is a phrase that has been heard in the hearts of many Arab and African girls in their young age in family gatherings and village women. White skin, and disregard for serious health damage.
Lightening is a public demand
The pursuit of skin lightening is not a new thing for women. Natural and chemical mixtures have been around for decades, only their shapes, effectiveness and harms change, but marketing to them is now chasing girls on online stores and social media.
Girls use lightening creams that depend on the substance "hydroquinone" that is resistant to melanin that the body produces. Its damage include irritation in the skin and blindness. As for creams that rely on steroids and compounds intended to treat conditions such as eczema and doctors prescribe them for lightening, they lead to thinning and weakening of the skin and the appearance of stretch marks on it, as well as blue bruises. And scars to try from the body to reject it.
The use of these creams increases and even multiplies due to the girl’s addiction to them. The manufacturers add lightening compounds in a large percentage to give the girl a satisfactory result. Once the girl stops using it, the skin returns to its original color.
The sales of skin whitening products also increased in 2015, with the total sales percentage reaching nearly $ 10 billion, and the number in 2024 is expected to reach 31.2 billion.
And the warnings may not have come with the results of the girl realizing what she pays in exchange for a skin tone that she may not necessarily want, but she wants to obtain the social and economic privileges of the white skin.
According to the New York Times, in Africa and poor societies, women seek to conform to the criteria that men want to marry, the reality that if they flee from them they will not escape easily from the ads and the terms of bullying and comparison.
Magic syringe
Statistics compiled by the World Health Organization in 2011 showed that 40% of African women whiten their skin, and up to 77% in some countries despite WHO warnings of damage to skin bleaching such as liver and kidney damage, psychosis, cancer, and fetal brain damage in a woman's womb.
And recently spread in the Arab countries a treatment to resist the basic pigment of the skin by injecting women with glutathione until it became the first advice for months for some doctors due to its ease in exchange for peeling sessions, and its great financial return on cosmetic clinics, it is just a quick injection under the skin that runs with the blood, and its result is faster and less pain.
Glutathione is made from the antioxidants that the liver produces naturally and is found on the market in the form of injections and pills.
One of the most dangerous features promoted by some doctors regarding this substance is its ability to lighten the color of the fetus in the womb of its mother, and the Food and Drug Administration and the World Health Organization warn of this substance.
Be radiant
According to the New York Times report published at the end of last July, "Unilever's Fair & Lovely" is the most famous brand in selling lightening creams for less than two dollars due to messages that are broadcast by advertisements directing women that this cream is the solution. For your emotional problems with your husband, your work disagreements, your path for career advancement and assuming leadership positions, and if you don't, you will lose interest around you, just because you are brown.
The company believes in competition, as it is the first in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and it sells millions of products annually, and according to financial analysts, it achieves $ 500 million annually from its sales in India alone.
The company recently attempted to change its marketing method, and to create a new production line for brunettes, in an implicit recognition that brown skin color is not a layer of dirt that must be disposed of, but it is unlikely that the new method will reverse the prejudices inherent in society and the company has exploited them for nearly half a century.
There are other international companies involved in marketing based on words such as: white, bright, glamorous, pearl white, such as L'Oreal, Johnson & Johnson, and others who started to submit to the slogans of change And anti-racism in the West after the death of George Floyd in America as a punishment for his dark skin, but the picture was not completed amid the refusal of other companies for fear of their sales, or a refusal to change.