Skin bleaching can be seen as a superficial form of self-styling, a form of adornment and bodily enhancement, just like plastic surgery, make-up or hair straightening.
The aim is to use the chemical opportunity afforded by bleaching to achieve a certain beauty ideal and spectacle that is not about devaluing blackness.
Rather, it is about expressing one’s participation in the global fashion system, and showing off an ability to rework sociobiological “memes”.
We should remember that many of the people who unabashedly bleach their skin occupy the lower sociocultural and economic rungs.
For them, appearance is everything.
It is often the only currency they have to trade with; their first and only engagement with the world.
They therefore invest more in their physical styling.
Part of that currency is to “step out” with luminous, light, radiant skin enhanced by hydroquinone cream and layers of pale foundation, mascara, rouge, eye shadow and shimmering painted lips.
While some of the women I know on Lagos Island who bleach their skin do so on their own terms without any desire for whiteness and its privileges.
Far from self-hatred, these women are so self-possessed they would find the idea of desiring whiteness quite ludicrous.
For them, skin bleaching provides the opportunity to change what they don’t like about their appearance or to further enhance what they find beautiful with cream or a “concoction”.
There is no shame, hatred or deep reflection behind the choice.
It is a fashion statement, a way to show off and be the subject of marvel.
That bleaching should induce shame in the participant is more a projection of the bourgeois world that is so angst-ridden it fears that yellow fever threatens to expose its own indebtedness to the European beauty ideal.
This is a very interesting article by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf in which she argues that women who skin bleach are not doing so out of self-hate or seeking to be like white people. She recognises that preference for light-skin can be traced to European colonialism and enslavement of Africans but goes on to say that women who bleach their skin today, have no connection with that history and bleach because they want to stand out by having lighter skin not because they hate being Black. So bleaching for them is just another cosmetic procedure.
I honestly think she has a point. I personally won’t bleach and won’t endorse bleaching but Bibi Bakare-Yusuf may have a point. I mean we recognise the history of relaxing hair, and at the same time we know that Black women who relax their hair today aren’t necessarily doing this because they hate being Black. So can the same reasoning be applied to skin bleaching? Or is that too problematic?
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