NAIROBI (dpa) – Janet looks despairingly in the mirror. What she sees are thick red boils and blisters covering what had once been a pretty face.
“I wanted white skin,” the 19-year-old Kenyan says. “Now I don’t have any skin at all.”The dream of becoming light-skinned ends up in grim reality for many African women. Trying to improve their chances of getting a job or winning a husband, they resort to skin-bleaching creams and ointments.But the toxic chemical mixtures can destroy not only the skin and body organs, but can also end up being fatal. As a result, more and more countries are banning such creams, yet sales of imported products from Europe continue to boom.“I have lost my face,” says an ashamed Janet. She had repeatedly smeared herself with creams with such appealing names as “Light and Beautiful” or “Princess” on the packages.“My girlfriends talked me into it,” she related. “I saw how pretty their skin had become and so I copied them. At first I also become lighter. But after two weeks I got black blotches all over. It burned terribly.”Every day, many young women like Janet are to be found sitting in the waiting room of dermatologist Melanie Miyanji of the Aga Khan Hospital in the capital Nairobi.“They have become poisoned by the idea of an ideal beauty and then they poisoned themselves,” says the doctor who is a fierce opponent of skin bleaching. The creams and ointments usually contain highly- toxic substances like quicksilver or hydrochinon, which have long ago been banned in cosmetic products in Europe.“The chemicals slow down the production of melanin, a pigment which protects the skin from the sun and which is therefore especially important in our region,” Miyanji says.“The skin becomes weak. Veins rise to the surface, with the paradoxic result that they make the skin darker. In places it becomes blacker than before,” she adds.Worse, the blood vessels and skin pores are attacked and through them, the toxic substances enter the internal organs.“This can end up being fatal, such as causing skin cancer or kidney failure,” the dermatologist points out.In many African countries like Kenya, South Africa and Cameroon, such mixtures are officially banned. But home-made miracle pastes or imports from Europe continue to flood the market.“This will remain the case so long as the motto is ‘light is beautiful’,” Miyanji says. She, like other skin bleaching opponents, blames wrong attitudes stemming from the past colonial era.“The white man has the advantage. So people believe that lighter skin will guarantee them better jobs and better partners,” says Phillipa Musoke, a dermatologist at a clinic in the Ugandan capital of Kampala.“When women see other women who have lighter skins and who are in higher positions, then many resort to bleaches in order also to have a chance,” she says.Not only career chances are a motive.In countries ranging from Uganda to Tanzania to Nigeria, young women bleach their skins in order to boost the value of their dowry. Also, many mothers in West Africa will have their babies’ noses clamped in the hope that the noses will appear thinner and therefore more “European”.One strategy which Kenyan advertising expert Sameer Ambegoanker swears by is the “50-50 concept” which he admitted to a newspaper reporter.“One parent white, the other black – when such a girl enters a bar, the men’s heads turn toward her. Every woman wants to look that way,” he said.This is precisely what dermatologist Miyanji wants to talk her patients out of.“When one comes to me because she wants to be lighter, then I say to her, ‘you are black and you will stay that way, for that is your heritage. It is a beautiful heritage. Black is beautiful’.”
