For Whiter Skin, Some Are Turning to Injections
Skin lightening is about power. It's an expression of power, and so people who lighten their skin are doing this because they are responding to a power dynamic that exists in their particular society.
In many parts of the world, lighter skin is considered to be more beautiful than darker skin. It's a beauty standard that's been around for hundreds of years.
Lighter skin has been associated with power and privilege, and the beauty industry has been profiting by selling skin lightening creams and soaps which are popular across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean.
By 2027, the global market for skin lighteners is estimated to reach over $12 billion.
Skin whitening is definitely a huge business. The patients look forward to having much fairer or whiter skin, and they could go to any lengths to achieve that.
The history of skin lightening here in the United States. It actually begins with white women. White women here would use skin-lightening products because they were trying to emulate beauty standards and beauty practices that were circulating in Europe. And then around the Jim Crow era, we see is skin-lightening products being used and sold and circulated within the African-American community.
Black women would use this partly because it would be a survival strategy, essentially. The lighter your skin was, the more access to resources you would have. And so this is what made skin lightening products in part popular mong more communities of color.
The idea was that if you were trying to emulate the people in power, you were seen as more civilized, you were seen as cleaner, and therefore, that would give you access to certain things.
It would allow you upward mobility, upward class mobility, et cetera.
When a kid, was one shade darker than his sister. And we both went to the same school. Everybody used to be a little surprised when he told them she was her sister. So they said, how is there such a huge difference in your skin color?
So, he always had this, but there was no pressure from his family members. But friends and classmates definitely did question him about his skin color once upon a time. In Asia, the practice of skin whitening is related to colorism, looks-based discrimination that occurs within racial or ethnic groups. And in India, a part of everyday life.
Individuals who have fairer skin are more acceptable when it comes to career or marriage. If you also go to the matrimonial columns in the newspapers or magazines, they say I look for a fairer bride, or there are women who look for a fairer groom. So it's equal.
The desire to have fairer, skin is deep-seated in the Indian population. Most experts agree that colorism bled into India's caste system, where darker skin has since become associated with Indians at the lowest levels of the social hierarchy, who do manual labor.
Historians are undecided about the origins of this color prejudice. While some point to ancient migrations by Indo-Europeans, Arabs, and Persians, all of whom had strikingly lighter colored skin than local inhabitants.
Others note the more recent colonial rule of the British Empire. The Britishers ruled us for about roughly 200 years. The Indians were kind of treated very badly, or they were slaves. They worked for the Britishers for many, many years.
So, they look forward to the British skin, and they thought that the British skin was acceptable because there were fairer.
Asia is the biggest market for skin-lightening products. The World Health Organization found the 40% of women they asked in China, India, and other Asian countries said they regularly use them.
In India, skin lightening is a multi-million-dollar industry. Around 80% of skin moisturizers on the market are for skin whitening.
The most widely used was Fair & Lovely. It earns more than $500 million each year for Unilever from India alone.
So I used to see the product Fair & Lovely even while I was a kid. So it's about 25 years old. It is quite popular, and it's manufactured by a company called Hindustan Unilever limited. And it's a booming business.
Due to global public pressure on brands following the 2020 George Floyd protests, the Indian affiliate of Unilever changed the name to Glow & Lovely.
In a statement the company said, "We recognize the use of words, 'fair', 'white' and 'light' suggests a singular ideal of beauty that we don't think is right, and we want to address this."
The Indian government has proposed jail terms and fines for advertisements that promote skin whitening.
But that hasn't stopped many Indians obsessed with lighter skin from buying and using these products. Something like this has been going on in our societies for so long.
We discriminate against people based on their skin color and no one's saying anything about it. You know, when you see the way it affects children, it affects women, it affects men, and they grow with that sense of insecurity.
It's like a journey we've been on this toxic belief, where it started with culture, it started with social hierarchies and the media keeps endorsing it. Companies may not have initiated it, but by endorsing it, by selling products through advertisements that say that you can be whiter in seven days or white is better if you're fairer, you'll be more successful too.
The thing is, they're using the insecurity that colorism has bred to sell their product. So you're kind of making money off people's insecurities. And then we just lived with it, and it's become normal. Apart from using whitening products, some people go even further, receiving cosmetic procedures like chemical peels or laser treatment. In recent years, an antioxidant called glutathione is gaining popularity.
While it's available to take orally, many consumers believe injecting the drug is faster and more effective for skin whitening, but this hasn't been scientifically proven. If they have a medical condition, yes, I will do it.
But if they just want to achieve a skin whitening treatment, I would refuse to do that for them because the safety and efficacy of the drug glutathione are not well established. Glutathione is produced naturally in the human liver.
In India, oral glutathione is approved for treating skin conditions and for skin whitening. But intravenous and intramuscular glutathione is only approved to treat medical conditions like the side effects of chemotherapy.
There are very few clinical trials. There are certain drawbacks to those studies because those studies were done on a very limited number of subjects.
Also, the patients were not followed up for a long term or a long period. There are practitioners who do use it, but it's an off-label indication. But what has been observed is that it's a very subjective opinion from the patient in terms of how much skin lightening they have been able to achieve with the treatment.
So it's not necessary that if you administer the infusion in ten patients, all the ten patients are going to observe the same change. Due to a lack of research and regulations, clinics make up their own protocols and set their own prices, ranging from $50 to $70 per injection. In the Philippines, almost 400 years of Spanish and then American colonial rule helped to reinforce the notion of beauty as white. And so today, glutathione is becoming a popular alternative to traditional lighting products.
When we look at a place like the Philippines, people there will use skin-lightening products because they're trying to emulate those who are in power; they're trying to emulate things that they see on TV. And when you watch, for example, Philippine TV, it's inundated with actors and actresses and performers who are typically light-skinned.
When you look at the Philippine government, many politicians are either mixed race or light-skinned. Marjorie Taguiling owns a beauty salon in downtown Manila that offers beauty services including glutathione drips for skin whitening.
The country's Food and Drug Administration has warned against the use of injectable glutathione for skin whitening, flagging its toxic effects on the liver, kidneys, and nervous system.
But many big medical groups and small beauty salons are still provided with a price tag of up to $120 per session.
Some beauty salons or moonlighting nurses even offer injections at home. I would say that is unacceptable because sometimes if it is injected in the wrong manner or if it is injected in a huge dose, it can cause severe allergic reactions.
Sometimes it can be a casualty or an emergency. I think it's an issue of access. The more available a certain process is, the more people are going to be curious about it. These more advanced processes, what they do is create more legitimacy for the practice, but at no point do we step back and say, why is this necessary to begin with?
While some are still doing whatever it takes to become lighter, others are beginning to embrace their own skin. And awareness of color discrimination has increased in recent years.
India's Got Color. In India, the advocacy group Dark is Beautiful has been organizing workshops and events to fight colorism. What needs to happen is change both within culture as and well as change from these external endorsements.
And cosmetic brands and businesses have a responsibility, it's not about people wanting it, and so we do it. This is not like some problem that we can fix overnight.
It takes several such movements, several such campaigns like ours, like the Dark is Beautiful campaign. And so it's gonna take some time before we can feel the change. We have to ground change in structures.
So, we need to see major reforms in education, we need to see major reforms in government, and we need to see major reforms in media representation. And not just aesthetic representation, it's not enough to cast darker-skinned people on TV and to think yeah, people are going to love their skin.
It's about how we're represented in government and taking away historical governmental policies that were created to subjugate people of color, that were created to subjugate darker-skinned people.
We spend a lot of time grooming our outside, right? We dress up, we want to be presentable, we dress a certain way.
So I think what really will help us is mental grooming, to keep telling ourselves every day that we are enough, you are enough just the way you are, and every skin color is beautiful.
Istanbul is arguably the world's most popular city to get hair transplant treatment.
Before Covid hit, it's estimated that half a million people came here every year in the hopes of regaining their hair.
In no small part because of the quality of the work being offered and the price it's offered at.
But it's a lightly regulated industry and with hundreds of clinics competing against each other,
the pressure is on to increase operations and cut prices even further.
You must be logged in to post a comment.