Dr. Sylvester Ikhisemojie
The practice of seeking materials which are usually chemicals to lighten the colour of the skin is known broadly as bleaching.
This practice is often put to good use
when it helps to remove or lighten skin pigmentation caused by birth
marks, or some old injury that increases the amount of melanin in the
local area of the skin. The result is that the skin is made lighter with
the removal of the extra melanin.
It is called skin lightening, a pervasive
practice among the dark-skinned races of the world. For many years, it
was also a nearly exclusive preserve of the women with many of them
engaging indiscriminately in the practice. In this century, however, men
are increasingly participating in the practice. While some of these
chemicals have been found useful in removing unwanted skin pigments,
some others are not so safe. The safety profile of some of them has been
questioned at many fora. That has added to the controversy surrounding
their use among women and among certain ethnic groups.
There is a lot of evidence to support the
suggestion that bleaching may be a harmful process. Among the poor,
what is frequently available are cheaper products that contain
hydroquinone and mercurious chloride, both of which are harmful. The
latter contains a heavy metal, namely mercury, which is slowly absorbed
in the system with no hope of eventual excretion. A slow poisoning thus
results with permanent injury to the kidneys, the brain and the heart. A
failure of any of these organs has no hope of repair except by having
an organ transplant. Even so, the brain cannot be transplanted. That is
not to mention the initial damage to the skin that reduces its quality
and its ability to protect the individual from simple injuries and
microbial invasion.
On the other hand, it is often
frustrating to have to suture skin lacerations in the emergency room of a
woman who has bleached her skin red or pink in an effort to become more
attractive. The wounds take longer to heal and the eventual result of
such healing is poor. The scars are less satisfactory and such skin is
also less like to heal primarily. The overall result is very
unsatisfactory, and this applies to those wounds that do not get to be
compromised further by bacterial infection. When an infection takes
root, it is difficult to control and to treat and the eventual healing
can cause some hideous scarring. Some have had to endure limb
amputations because the infection they had could not be controlled and
their lives were in grave danger.
As a result of these fears, hydroquinone
was banned in Europe for many years and although it is available again,
it is strictly a controlled substance available only on the prescription
of a doctor. In many nations of Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia,
these products are available with less ethical controls and so can be
assessed by all who have the relatively little sums of money that can
provide them with it.
In Nigeria, a series of tests conducted
on common skin lightening creams showed that they caused mutations in
bacteria and were possibly carcinogenic. This is very sobering news
indeed for all those people who engage in skin bleaching that if it is a
practice they want to continue with, then they need to move away from
these cheap substitutes to the better products that are free of toxins.
Those products are much more expensive though, because of the costly
ingredients that go into their production. There is a huge market for
such products among the wealthy Asian nations of Japan, South Korea,
Singapore and Taiwan and many of them originate in Europe. The average
man or woman in sub-Saharan Africa who has less disposable income, but
wants to appear lighter all the same, is condemned to continue using the
cheap, toxic products available to their economic bracket.
In the end, it is of vital importance to
use any bleaching cream wisely by following the instructions very
carefully. Do not overdo its application because you believe that the
results will be faster to arrive and do not engage in mixing different
products because you are not schooled enough to determine what chemical
interactions could occur between these compounds. When such interactions
do occur, they may be severe enough to cause skin damage over and above
what the manufacturer intended. This creates a scenario that
complicates the management of any lesion that affects that kind of skin
and certainly increases the challenge of taking care of it.
Also, some of these products are probably
carcinogenic. In other words, they have the ability to induce the
formation of certain types of cancer, and this has to be a very negative
legacy arising from a desire to change one’s looks and perhaps become
more beautiful. It is a supreme irony of the modern age that while the
dark-skinned races want to increasingly become “white,” the Caucasian
woman desires to acquire a tan in the sunny beaches of Africa, Asia and
the Caribbean in order to get a shade darker and appear healthier.
On the whole, it is wise to note that
these creams are mostly in use to deal with certain types of skin
diseases; to remove the skin stains caused by chronic liver disease;
aging; or the effects of using oral contraceptives on the skin. The
wholesale skin bleaching which many women and increasingly men indulge
in today must be seen in the context of the wider health risks they
engender as very damaging potentially. It is thus a practice that needs
to stop or in the alternative have the people who believe in its
usefulness to scale up their involvement by investing their money in
proven products with an acceptable safety profile. Such products are
more expensive without a doubt but the increased cost pales into
insignificance when compared to the ruinous legacy of enduring a leg
amputation or of dealing with cancer or of funding an expensive organ
transplant. As the maxim goes, a word is enough for the wise.
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