By Adetokunbo Abiola
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Jessica Agba’s two years son cried at the Akure hospital near Oba Adesida Road. Large boils littered his body, some of it bringing out pus , making the baby look ugly. When the doctor called Jessica to a corner, demanding the reason for the unsightly nature of her baby, she admitted that she mixed a steroid cream with shea butter and slathered his skin with it in order to lighten the skin of her baby.
Also in Akure, a twenty-year-old girl called Bimbo Ologundudu stood in the waiting of an hospital at Ijapo, her face disfigured with boils etched in the area around her nose. When the doctor asked for the reason for her disfigured appearances she admitted using skin-lightening creams, only the exercise turned out leaving her disfigured.
Iyabo Adegbite stood in front of this reporter, looking haggard, blotches on her face, interspersed with boils, a far cry from the beautiful girl of years in the past. When asked the reason for the boils and blotches the story emerged, and it dwelled on the use of creams to lighten her skin, only the exercise turned Iyabo into a monster who needed a treatment.
Many Nigerian women now need treatments in hospitals, having been turned into monsters through the use of skin-ligthening creams, their faces filled with boils and blotches, but this shouldn’t be surprising, as 77 per cent of Nigerian women — by extrapolation, more than 60 million people — use skin-lightening products on a “regular basis”, according to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2011.
Nigerians associate a dark skin with unsatisfactory traits such as ugliness, low social class, poor education, life of economic disadvantages and struggles, with beauty associated with a lighter skin tone, intellectual brilliance, decorum and poise, said a report last year on the reasons why Nigerians use skin-lightening creams.
Also, many consider blotches in the skin to be an unwanted thing, something to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible, or they would be considered not beautiful, at an age when many consider beauty as a passport to social success and an upward movement within Nigeria’s social stratas.
Not unlike other places, Nigerians ascribe lots of importance to fashion, a penchant leading many to splash out lots of cash in order to appear fashionable, but having a dark skin won’t fit into this arrangement, because anything black is ugly and dangerous, said another report.
To enhance the fashion sense of most Nigerian women, 79.8 percent of them use skin lightening creams for the removal of blotches such as pimples and scars, 58.3 percent use them for skin-lightening, 79.5 percent of them use them for spot removal, and 67.0 percent use them to enhance their fashion, said another report last year.
The global market for skin lightening product is growing and is estimated to reach $20 billion by the end of the year, driven by countries such as Nigeria. A cross sectional study involving two selected universities in Osun State, Nigeria, assessed the perceived risks and consequences of skin bleaching among undergraduates in higher institutions found that almost half of the respondents (41.5%) had used bleaching agents, and 70.5% have a negative perception of its risks and consequences, showing that skin-lightening products are unbelievably popular in Nigeria.
In Lagos, the skin lightening market caters to individuals of different social classes, with product prices ranging from as little as ₦5,000 to as high as ₦150,000, and the product reportedly the fourth most sought-after household item by women, alongside essentials like soap, milk, and tea.
In a survey, 92 percent of female patients and five percent of male patients over the age of 16 who attended a skin clinic at Lusuth in Lagos between February and October 2004 reported using skin creams containing hydroquinone and other skin-lightening agents in the past, eighty percent of them were aware of the effects of the consequences of the sun’s exposure on the skin lightened by cream but only two percent taking protective measures.
With eighty percent aware of the harmful effects of skin-lightening creams and yet embracing it, it becomes understandable why lots of people require treatments at hospitals, as well as the secret behind the skin-lightening business in Lagos and other places, and the popularity of the product in the country, even though the Director-General of NAFDAC, Prof. Mojisola Adeyeye, raised the alarm on the menace of bleaching creams, saying the problem has become a national emergency that calls for solutions.
NAFDAC believes the flagging off of a media sensitisation workshop in the six geo-political zones of the country on the Dangers of Bleaching Creams and Regulatory Control organisms will tackle the issue, as well as stringent measures to be implemented against the menace.
Experts feel the move will yield dividends, if it also tackles such issues as identity as the root cause of the problem, by seeking to inculcate into many that the mentality of “white is good” and “black bad” might not be in the interest of millions of Nigerian women.
Whether this will curb the menace remains the subject of debate.
