The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

UK’s skin bleaching trade exposed

By CNN’s Alphonso Van Marsh

LONDON, England (CNN) — Accompanied by body-armor vested London police officers, Lambeth Senior Trading Standards Officer Ray Bouch walks into a beauty and cosmetics shop on Brixton’s Electric Avenue.

Bouch works for the London borough’s Public Protection Unit — tasked with keeping everything from faulty condoms to illicit vodka off the streets.

Today, he’s in search of contraband cosmetics: illegal skin bleaching creams British authorities say can be harmful to consumers. Within minutes, he’s found almost a dozen bars of soap listing a banned bleaching agent on the box.

“Illegal bleaching creams and soaps are a major problem,” Bouch says. “And once we eradicate it from Brixton, it will go to another borough where there’s a big Asian or Black population.”

Skin bleaching — using chemical or natural products to lighten skin color — is common practice in the Americas, Africa, across Asia, and increasingly, in Europe.

Psychologists say consumer demand can be traced to perceptions that lighter skinned or white people are more successful, intelligent and sexually desirable.

And as the UK’s Asian, African and African-Caribbean communities grow, so too — cosmetics industry experts say — does ethnic spending power for products promoted to lighten skin tone.

But some of these creams, soaps and solutions contain hydroquinone, an ingredient that is banned in cosmetic products sold in the United Kingdom.

The United States Food and Drug Administration says based on experiments done on animals, it “cannot rule out” hydroquinone’s potential cancer risk in humans.

Use of the ingredient in over-the-counter cosmetics is restricted, but still legal, in the U.S., South Africa and other countries. And some of these products are making their way to store shelves across the UK.

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PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING S-L-O-W-L-Y!

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But Bouch believes some shops are continuing to sell illegal skin creams despite the risk of fines because demand for the products is so high. “The only thing I can say is that it is demand-led. Shop owners are making a great profit from it,” Bouch says.

Cosmetics industry analysts say cosmetics companies are realizing there’s money to be made here. They argue minority communities are an underserved market with a long tradition of buying bleaching products — legal or otherwise.

One more clip from the article–

Dr. Dele Olajide, a leading psychologist at King’s College London, blames consumer demand on the media centering on fair skinned blacks like American pop singer Beyonce and British actress Thandie Newton.

“The image that the media presents about black people is that we are inferior, we are not as good as everybody else. But those who are successful and going places are those who are light-skinned people. So one might say that the desire to be like white people underpins people’s wanting to be fairer-skinned,” Olajide says.(more…)

Now ain’t this a blip! White folks will spend HOURS laying out either under the sun or under a heat lamp to get darker skin. Many of them will also get injections to increase lip size and/or pay big money to get a Brazilian butt lift. On the other hand you have Blacks, Asians and others who will also jeopardize their bodies at the expense of looking good—YET IT IS NON-WHITES WHO SUFFER FROM THE INFERIORITY COMPLEX????

As silly as this sounds, I actually see no problem with a person wanting to lighten their skin (gasp!!!)–as long it is done safely and the process was non-permanent (something scientifically I don’t know is possible)! I know, I know “But…but folks that do this kind of thing are ‘selling out’ and are shame of having darker skin”. Okay. Are we now supposed to conclude that White people have been “selling out” to darker skinned people for years as well and are “ashamed” of being White? To me, this is no different than the old weave versus natural hair debate.

Personally, don’t expect seeing this brutha “applying as directed”.