Saturday, April 6, 2013

WHO: 77% of Nigerian women bleach their skin, warns that it leads to kidney failure & cancer

WHO: 77% of Nigerian women bleach their skin, warns that it leads to kidney failure & cancer
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 77 percent of women in Nigeria use skin-lightening products, the world’s highest percentage. That compares with 59 percent in Togo, and 27 percent in Senegal. The reasons for this are varied but most people say they use skin-lighteners because they want “white skin”.
In many parts of Africa, lighter-skinned women are considered more beautiful and are believed to be more successful and likely to find marriage.
It’s not only women though who are obsessed with bleaching their skins. Some men too are involved in the practice.

Lightening creams are not effectively regulated in Nigeria where even roadside vendors sell tubes and plastic bags of powders and ointments from cardboard boxes stacked along sidewalks in market districts. Many of the tubes are unlabelled as to their actual ingredients.
In a market in Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital, business is booming for shops selling skin-lightening products. Both local and imported products line the shelves of Rashida Lawal’s cosmetics shop.
“About 90 percent of my clients come asking for skin whitening products,” she told Al Jazeera. “I sell it to them and give advice on what product is best for them and how to use them.”
Famous Nigerian Musician Femi Kuti says the use skin-lightening products have given rise to their own terminology.
“When the bleaching propaganda got so negative, they had to come up with toning. Bleaching sounds too hard, now it’s toning. I don’t bleach, they say, I tone!”
“They think bleaching is gege,” he told Al Jazeera, using a Nigerian term for cool.
Skin bleaching comes with hazardous health consequences. The dangers associated with the use of toxic compounds for skin bleaching include blood cancers such as leukemia and cancers of the liver and kidneys as well as severe skin conditions.
Hardcore bleachers use illegal ointments containing toxins like mercury, a metal that blocks production of melanin, which gives the skin its colour, but can also be toxic.
Ayobode Williams, a medical doctor, says the skin bleaching agents have both internal and external effects on those who use them.
“Systemically it causes things like kidney failure because of the mercury in some of the products and it also causes eczema, skin pigmentation among a host of other infections,” he told Al Jazeera.
Dr Williams warned that sustained use of bleaching agents could cause even cancer.
Yet few seem to pay attention to these dangers. For those who bleach, staying black is not beautiful at all.

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