The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry (mercury)

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/


Pigmentation and Empire
The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry

Skin-whitening or skin-bleaching is a practice whereby women (and some men) use various forms of skin-whitening products in order to make their skin appear as white as possible. As an anti-aging therapy, skin-whitening promises to "restore" as well as to"transform" the aging skins of women and make them smooth, wrinkle-free-younger-looking. In this context, the natural aging process is systematically framed as a pathological condition which must be interrupted through measures such as "elective surgery" and or by bleaching out the signs of aging such as "age spots." In this way, in the case of white women, skin-whitening is presented as a legitimate intervention designed to 'cure' and mitigate the disease of aging. Skin-whitening as a biomedical intervention is predicated on the pathologization of the natural aging processes in all women, white women in particular.

At least in the United States, racially white eastern and southern European women have used skin-whitening in order to appear as 'white' as their 'Anglo-Saxon' "native" white sisters. In the United States, women of colour also have practiced skin-whitening. Many of the early skin-bleaching commodities such as Nodinalina skin bleaching cream, a product which has been in the US market since 1889, contained 10 per cent ammoniated mercury. Mercury is a highly toxic agent with serious health implications. According to Kathy Peiss , in 1930, a single survey found advertising for 232 different brand names of skin-bleaching creams promoted in mainstream magazines to mainly white women consumers in the United States.

If dark skinned eastern and southern Europeans can "pass" for white with a little help from skin-bleaching creams, those with sufficiently light skin tones but who are legally categorized as racially black by their invisible " one drop" of "black blood", could also "pass" for white as well. The "appearance of whiteness" is the key to accessing the exclusive cultural and economic privileges whiteness accrues. The fear of the infiltration of "invisible' blackness has fuelled both the marketing strategies of industry and the anxieties of white women that they may not appear "white enough".

-snip-

This is the same chemical agent which has caused the disfigurement of the South African woman in the above image and of countless other women around the world. This product is manufactured by a major US- based pharmaceutical company. Lustra skin-whitening cream is extensively promoted on internet shops, beauty salons and dermatology offices in the United States. The primary clientele of Lustra are white middle-class women.

-snip-

I hope that I have demonstrated that the emerging skin-whitening industry is a lucrative globalized economic enterprise with profound social and political implications. L'Oreal's advertising for skin-whitening commodities reinforces and consolidates the globalized ideology of white supremacy and the sexist practice of the biomedicialization of women's bodies. It is in this specific context of the continuum of the western practice of global racism and the economic practice of commodity racism that the social, political and cultural implications of skin-whitening must be located and resisted. Consequently, feminist/antiracist and anti-colonial responses must confront this social phenomenon as part and parcel of our old enemy, the "civilising mission" ; the violent moral prerogative to cleanse and purify the mind and bodies of the "dark/dirt/savage". On March 10, 2004, two weeks prior to the American invasion of Iraq, Time magazine's cover featured the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. The caption reads: "Life After Saddam: an inside look at Bush's high-risk plan to occupy Iraq and remake the Middle East" . Hussein's face is painted white by a white man wearing a white casual shirt with matching casual white pants and a white baseball hat using a white paint brush. The colour of the dictrator's unpainted skin looks exceedingly black and menacing. The lower half of the dictator's face and neck are riddled with bullet holes.
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this is a very long article that details how women are psy-oped into whitening their skin with toxic mercury, etc. by the big cosmetic companies who earn big bucks over this deadly scam on women.

this is big business crime and that's why I put it in General Discussion

-snip-

[benburch]

1. I fail to see why that product is legal?

Mercury thermometers are banned! Why not this?

[babylonsister]

2. This product is VERY big in Indonesia; women equate

white/whiter skin with being more wealthy and one sees commercials all the time promoting these products and that idea.

[varun]

3. India is a huge market for such products

Lighter skin is desireable here, especially for marriage minded women.

[patdem]

4. We go to the beach to get tanned..and have our lips enhanced for fullness

and yet we hate black people? This disconnect makes me CRAZY :crazy:

Oh, I for got the permanents we give our hairdos to produce curly hair?

I just don't get it? :shrug:

[harlinchi]

7. Here's one the always confused me:

White women go to the hair dresser to get a perm (permanent) to make their hair more bushy and curly. Black women go to the hair dresser to make their hair more straight and less bushy. Neither of these permanent hair treatments are.

[medeak]

5. Michael Jackson? Is he going to get Parkinsons next? n/t

[Democracy White]

6. I hate being a white, Italian female

actually Italians aren't white, but more of the Meditteranean race. So I love my tanned, olive toned skin. I wish I was black because I think that black, Afrocentric people are beautiful I love their full lips, high cheekbones and beautiufl brown skin.

I don't hate white people but I feel that they aren't that attractive to me. (Sorry if I offended any whites out there)

The more exotic one is, the more I feel attracted to them.

Dee

[Igel]

8. As far as I can ascertain, OTC bleaching creams containing

mercury were discontinued in the '70s in the US (and they're certainly banned in the UK), but imported brands may not be properly labelled or regulated. From the article, I almost get the impression that it's still legal for OTC use in the US. In any event, we're talking ethyl mercury.

The first "-snip-" is disingenuous. The discourse moved from mercury compounds to hydroquinone (aka 1,4-dihydroxybenzene). That's also banned in the UK. There are also other skin-lightening compounds out there, but which are less dangerous, and therefore not worthy of mention.

Lighter skin has been a fashion objective for millennia, only becoming meshed in people's minds with racism in the last hundred years or so, a bit longer in the American south. If you have a society in which people work outside, exposed to sun, light skin means you're well off enough to not work outside: this has been true since 1k BC, running through mid-east societies to Greece to Rome to Europe, and is reflected in the folklore of cultures that is probably older than contact with European civilization.

Americans used to privilege lighter skin in the US (for beauty, that is, all racism aside): but that got reversed when suddenly most people worked inside. Then having pale skin was a sign of factory work, while those who had leisure time could lounge around outside. But a "farmer's tan" was still the sign of social death, or a tan that wasn't evenly distributed on the face, legs, and arms: it meant you weren't *laying* there, but walking around, presumably working. Very bad. This kind of contrast is far from universal, but is wide-spread in geography and history.

Similarly, in poor societies where food is scarce, or TB rampant, plumpness is a virtue in women; in rich societies, it's bad. If you are male in a society where everybody does heavy manual labor, being thin and non-buff is a good thing (but toned, not puny); if you're in a society where most men sit and work, being muscular is a good trait. Eh.

Caste pressures in India are a rather different sort of critter: there's a general darkness gradient from high to low castes (with a bit of variance, to be sure), originally because of the old Indo-European racial superstratum on a primarily Dravidian substratum.

Why Indonesia falls for the pale-is-beautiful line, I don't know. But I'd be hesitant to assume right off the bat that it's an imposed value.