Skin Whitening and Skin Lightening Resources

Is there truth in advertising? Retouching photos is a common practice in the marketing industry

Fair & Lovely, one of the leading products in the skin whitening sector, are allegedly using photo touch-up techniques to justify claims of desired results.

Similar advertisements manufactured by FMCG giant Unilever, displaying photographic changes were earlier [...]

A controversial surgical operation carried out in Damascus to change the colour of a Syrian woman’s eyes has raised public fears about the safety of cosmetic surgery in the country.

The surgeon who performed the operation, Mohamad Shoujah, said the procedure that replaced the unidentified patient’s brown irises with artificial green ones [...]

Senior head of the skin clinic at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Dr Ncoza Dlova, said she had sent samples of Pure Perfect for analysis after 15 patients said the product had caused them to break out in acne or darkened the colour of their skin. Other Durban dermatologists had seen patients with similar [...]

Dozens of research studies have shown that skin tone and other racial features play powerful roles in who gets ahead and who does not. These factors regularly determine who gets hired, who gets convicted and who gets elected.

Consider: Lighter-skinned Latinos in the United States make $5,000 more on average than darker-skinned [...]

Burns and scarring from overusing bleaching creams are common

The selling of whitening creams is a lucrative business in Africa worth millions of US dollars a year. In some countries that allow the use of these lethal substances, shelves in pharmacies are stacked high with lotions, creams and soaps all promising to make [...]

In South Asia, lighter skin has been linked to social class and status.

Lubna Khan, 32, from Longsight, uses Lightenex skin whitening and even concocts her own treatment. She hides well away from the sun and would never consider going on a beach holiday. “The only time I’ve sat on a beach was in Blackpool [...]

Former baseball star Sammy Sosa, a native Dominican, was recently photographed with markedly whiter skin.

In an interview with Spanish-language TV show Primer Impacto, Sosa blamed the change on a skin moisturizer.

“It’s a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin some,” Sosa said. “It’s a cream that I have, that [...]

Commercials are sending a not-so-subtle message to men in Asia: Get whiter skin, and you’ll get the girl and the job of your dreams. Or at the very least you’ll be noticed. But in a country where most people have brown skin, the message being sent to men and women has some people [...]

New research says just how addictive smoking is for you depends on the color of your skin, and reveals the link between nicotine and melanin.

Smoking is especially bad for people with dark, melanin-rich skin.

Inhaling thousands of chemicals is not a good idea. But it is especially bad for people with dark, [...]

Who determines beauty?

I come from a place where many women dye their skin to be lighter. The chemicals in the dyes seem to eat away at their skin, and make them extremely sensitive to sunlight.

These are women who live in a country where the sun is always shining, and even [...]

Humans come in a rainbow of hues, from dark chocolate browns to nearly translucent whites. This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occurring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

The consensus among scientists has always [...]

Fair And Lovely skin bleach cream is the biggest selling beauty product in the country, with an ad campaign that says “Guaranteed fairness or your money back.”

This emphasis on fairness, however, “is having a bad impact on society as a whole,” says Mariam Davley, an activist for women’s rights.

In [...]

Global skin lightening market is worth US$10 billion in 2015

The global skin lightening market is predicted to reach $10 billion by 2015, driven by new markets in the West and sustained growth in Asia-Pacific, a report by Global Industry Analysts (GIA) has revealed.

The research confirmed the dominance of the Asian market for [...]

An African woman bleaching her skin

The African Commission of Health and Human Rights Promoters (CAPSDH) disclosed that skin diseases now constitute one of the top five out-patient cases in most hospitals in Ghana.

“The humidity, vectors, ignorance, way of life of people and skin bleaching which now starts at [...]

Another fast way to lighten skin with no downtime involved is the intravenous glutathione. Some celebrities even avail of double doses of glutathione with Vitamin C once a week for five straight weeks and maintain with one dose a week then every two weeks when they have reached their desired color. Prices range [...]

Carlene, 35, from Kingston, Jamaica, has been “bleaching” her skin for three years. She uses skin lightening creams which are popular with many Afro-Caribbean, African and Asian people, despite repeated health warnings. Some of the products contain toxic chemicals, such as hydroquinone, which may cause skin irritation, bleaching, or even infection, when applied [...]

Skin-bleaching products were common in the United States among African-Americans during the 1920s and 1930s. Advertisements for creams and ointments such as Bleach and Glow, Plough’s Black and White, Artra and Nadinola appeared in black publications. These, like Artra, bluntly advertised that they would offer a change, promising “lighter, lovelier skin.” By the [...]