MikeyC
The Coli Royal Rumble Champion 2019
On a crisp, sunny morning a couple of official vehicles, including a police car, pull into a quiet cul-de-sac in a seaside town. Officers get out and knock on the door of one of the houses, then proceed to search it: every cupboard is opened, every box. Old furniture is pulled out of the garage. The officers, who are from both London and the local council, and are funded by National Trading Standards, scour the property, hunting for illegal skin-lightening products imported from Asia and Africa. Jars are bagged and tagged while the inhabitants of the house are interviewed. These products will be sent to a lab and tested. If they meet legal requirements, they will be returned. If they don’t, they will be destroyed, and a formal criminal prosecution will begin.
Not all products that purport to lighten the skin are illegal, but many creams from outside the EU contain chemicals banned under safety regulations. These include mercury and hydroquinone – which with prolonged use are linked to poisoning, skin damage and liver and kidney malfunction – and corticosteroids, which in the UK are prescription-only products. Misuse of corticosteroid creams is associated with thinning of the skin, an increased chance of skin cancer and, counterintuitively, darkening of the skin.
This raid has taken place toward the end of a year-long campaign to put a dent in the sales of dangerous cosmetics online. Southwark Trading Standards is leading the nationwide initiative, using officers who have been tackling the sale of illegal skin-lightening products in hotspot market areas such as Peckham, south London, since the mid-90s. But as internet marketplaces have grown, so local work solely focusing on retail – namely, specialist ethnic stores – was no longer enough. National organisation was needed, and so, in 2017, a taskforce was assembled.
Paul Gander, the team leader at Southwark Trading Standards, says the work often involves the cooperation of a number of government agencies as well as private companies such as eBay and Paypal. Officers scan the websites, issuing warnings to sellers circumventing the rules and working with the marketplaces to block listings containing suspect product names. But sellers are quick to adopt new tactics, from using code words to misrepresenting products. “Anecdotally,” says Gander, “since hydroquinone was banned [in 2001] – and it’s been banned in more and more countries – we’ve seen more sales of seemingly legal products that contain alternatives such as kojic acid. But quite often they’re not accurately described – they do contain hydroquinone. Or they contain other potent ingredients.”
It’s difficult to pinpoint how many people are using skin-lighteners – legal or otherwise – in the UK, but around the world, business is booming. In 2017, the global skin-lightening industry was worth $4.8bn (£3.4bn), and it is projected to grow to $8.9bn by 2027, fuelled by a growing middle class in the Asia-Pacific region. Skin-lightening products include creams, scrubs, pills and even injections designed to slow the production of melanin. Many of these are created by pharmaceutical giants such as Unilever, Proctor and Gamble and L’Oreal and come with massive marketing budgets. A World Health Organization study found that 40% of Chinese women regularly use skin-lightening creams. That number is 61% in India and 77% in Nigeria. It stands to reason that diaspora communities will be influenced.
...
“The internet is the great battleground,” says Steve Garner, the head of criminology and sociology at Birmingham City University, who last year undertook the first British sociological study into skin-lightening. Garner’s sample was small; respondents willing to speak openly about their usage were hard to come by, even in a city as ethnically diverse as Birmingham. But there were nonetheless some striking findings. The first was the age at which respondents took up skin-lightening – 16 to 24 – and the second was the role the internet played.
“The internet’s role is primarily two things: the information and the image,” says Garner. That image is almost invariably the archetypal before and after pic – the sad, dark-skinned person against the smiling, light-skinned person – touted both by big brands and by individuals posting about their skin-lightening journey. “I often saw discussions between people who are, say, based in the UK, saying: ‘You should get the American version of a particular product because the rules are slightly different in the States,’ for example,” he says. “You can find the loopholes, you just have to subscribe to their forums.”
And these forums form a vital part of a skin-lightening subculture – an anonymised community for committed skin-lighteners. To the most evangelical, lightening is a way of life, one that involves eating a set diet, avoiding the sun and keeping to a meticulous daily skin-care regime, not to mention taking pills and injections. The forums are a hub for users to showcase their progression, troubleshoot and encourage each other, while having a safe space to discuss lightening culture. They have their own lingua franca – skin tone is described by code (eg NC10) pulled from the Mac makeup palette, for instance – and users regularly set others challenges to get to a tone by a set date. One forum, SkinCareTalk, hosts almost 450,000 posts discussing skin-lightening. Some make for troubling reading. “I’ve ruined my skin and don’t know what to do. I can’t stop crying,”
reads one entry. “I had acne scars on my face so I decided to use lightening products … but it made my face darker. I feel so lost. I’m so depressed.” “I used [hydroquinone] and messed my face up, help,” reads another. One user asks for advice after glutathione pills have caused them to break out in hives, while another kicks off a discussion about how to deal with friends or relatives “jealous” of their skin.
On YouTube, skin-lightening videos regularly accrue several million views, with the most popular being those from vloggers who focus on the use of products with natural or natural-sounding ingredients, either made at home or created by pharmaceutical companies. “I would never, ever recommend harsh whitening products,” says Jyoti Singh, AKA SuperPrincessJo, a beauty blogger from India who lives in Singapore, whose skin-lightening clips regularly attract millions of views. “People [can] have [a] desperate need to be whiter faster, so any recommendations can cause side-effects if used in excess or wrongly. So, I only share natural remedies that are safer.”
Garner is sceptical about whether the products purporting to be natural should be viewed differently, suggesting it is merely a matter of sales language. “People used to say skin ‘bleaching’, but it’s such a loaded term now. Instead, people use the neutral ‘lightening’, and increasingly common is the appetising ‘brightening’, which was pushed heavily by the major companies.”
Fraink White started lightening his skin when he was a teenager, using a variety of products including those with, as he describes it, “dangerous” ingredients such as hydroquinone. He began his YouTube channel to share his findings, warts and all, reviewing these items. “I did one recently where my face puffed up for days, it was awful. I’ve had some terrible results from products, even ones that have been FDA-approved.” Unlike many high-profile lightening vloggers, who largely hail from Asia, White is African American. He has become a kind of an internet posterboy for the practice, regularly arguing his position everywhere from Fox to the Daily Mail.
“Just because I lighten my skin, does not mean I want to be white,”
he says, although he concedes that some people may want to lighten their skin to distance themselves from their race. “I still look African American by my features, I’m not trying to change that. I just want to return my skin to the colour and texture of the skin usually covered by clothing which is less exposed to the sun. That’s my natural colour.”White launched his own skincare line recently, which he claims is “all-natural”, and says sales are on the up. “I think the taboos around skin-lightening are being broken. This is why I started my channel in the first place, to break the taboos and show people that there are natural, safe ways to take care of your skin, not just in lightening but in general. I wanted to help people stop using dangerous methods to achieve their skincare goals.” It is striking, however, that White’s most popular video is one where he recommends hydrogen peroxide, for “fast” results.
“There’s a very small public-health presence online in relation to skin-lightening,” says Garner. “So, the people discussing products, and selling the products, completely dominate this subject. If you wanted to counter these ideas using the internet, it would be daunting.”
...
“I understand some people oppose skin-lightening,” says Singh. “But there are a vast amount of girls out there who desperately need solutions. Sometimes the video requests I get have their personal stories, so when I share natural remedies I think: how will these help those women who suffer with societal pressures of looking better each day.”
White says: “People are thinking way too deeply about this. Some just think: ‘I’d look better 15lbs lighter with a narrower nose.’ That’s it. They’re not thinking about race. Everybody in their head has a 2.0 version of themselves that looks the best, it doesn’t mean that they hate themselves.:HALFMJPLS:” But Garner asks: “Why is the one with lighter skin always the best version of yourself? There’s something underpinning that, clearly, at societal level.”:kobesmuglol:
Read more: Skin-lightening creams are dangerous – yet business is booming. Can the trade be stopped?
