Paying for Lighter Skin With Your Health

The market for skin lightening products thrives by undermining women's self-esteem and equating dark skin with something to be ashamed of. But deep-seated psychological trauma aside, Caitlin Cohen points out on the Global Poverty blog that there are dangerous physical side effects to these products that go further than skin-deep.

The Chicago Tribune decided to undertake its own investigation into the risky world of skin lightening products in the United States by obtaining 50 such creams, geared toward anything from overall lightening of skin to disappearing age spots or freckles, and shipping them off for a lab for testing. Ten percent of the samples — regular skin "care" products that you or I could grab off the shelves — were found to contain enough mercury, a toxic element, to cause kidney damage with repeated use.

The Tribune reports that, in fact, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned mercury as an ingredient in these products almost two decades ago, but nobody's been bothering to check whether what's for sale meets those standards. The FDA responded that it cannot monitor all products, but as a result of the Tribune story as well as findings that at least a dozen people (including children) exposed to skin lightening creams were found to have elevated mercury levels and physical symptoms of poisoning, the agency has launched it's own investigation.

Given that pale girls like myself are constantly pressured to get an (unhealthy) tan, and resort to chemicals when cancer-causing UV rays aren't doing the trick, it's clear that there's no real way for a woman to win the skin color battle, expect by opting to not pay attention to the criticism of the beauty industry. No matter what your features are, they can find something wrong with you. And, seriously, are a couple of age spots or a splatter of freckles so terrible? I think freckles are cute, actually.

Yet the market for skin lightening products in the U.S. is only expected to grow over the next few years. And the lightening market an international scale, even in developing countries where women can hardly afford such products, yet are pressured to believe they need to change to be beautiful and succeed in life. In some of these countries, these "beauty" products may be even less well regulated than those in the U.S.

Of course, companies in the business of making you feel not-beautiful have a big incentive to claim that light is lovely: in China alone, skin lightening products are a $7 billion industry. That's a lot of money for them to lose if women one day decided that their shade of skin is just perfect the way it is.

Photo credit: Superskinlightener