I love bleaching my skin! Say whatttttt?

I love to bleach my skin! Well that's how a lot of people feel lately.  We live in a world where people discriminate you for all sorts of reasons, from the color of your skin to the color of your hair and if we all had the same color skin or hair we would probably be discriminated by the color of our eyes.


Some dark skin people resort to bleaching their skin to "look attractive" and become a browning,caring less about the health risks which include cancer. The amount of products available on the market are endless. The infamous cake soap (a clothes bleaching product), fair and white, topiclear and emami, just to name a few.

In Jamaica it has apparently become the norm to bleach your skin as one lady who was interviewed by the Jamaican Gleanor admitted that she buys bleaching cream for her 15-year-old son who attends high school. "Him did likkle bit too dark. Ah now him cute and the likkle schoolgrl them nuh stop rush him now that him a browning. Mi nuh see nutten wrong with it. Mi haffi tek care a mi pickney."

Now bleaching creams and bleaching tablets do work, just ask dancehall artiste Vybz Kartel, Soca Artiste Patrice Roberts and former baseball player Sammy Sosa. In an Interview, Vybz Kartel said that he sees bleaching your skin the same as relaxing your hair or getting a tan and he even has his own line of skin bleachers called 'VYBZ'.

The question remains, does bleaching your skin mean that you are ashamed of your color, have low self esteem, or is it as Kartel says, just like relaxing your hair. No big deal! Do black people lighten to enhance their beauty like makeup or plastic surgery? Were we brainwashed from slavery to believe that lighter skin is synonymous with beauty? Or is it that because its a trend mostly done by black people, society assumes that they do it because they dislike being black? We can even say that if skin lightening is said to imitate white culture, then tanning imitates black culture.


Evidence have shown that lighter skin people are sometimes considered before dark skin people, even when it comes to employment. Earlier this year, Aero Mexico, a Mexican Airline and its Ad agency, apologized for a producer's casting call requesting that only light skinned people apply as actors for a television commercial. The commercial has not yet been made, but the casting call specified it wanted "nobody dark skinned," only actors with "white skin". Hmmmmm.

Skin bleaching is not a new phenomenon, it has been taking place centuries ago. I was looking at some Ads from the 1940's and felt so ashamed and disgusted by them. I asked a friend of mine who is addicted to skin bleaching, about her views on the airline's Ad preference and she said "you see why I will never stop, I love bleaching my skin."

 

So