Source: Rwanda Focus
When entering one of the cosmetic shops in town, the sight that greets you is of rows of prod­ucts that are supposed to give smoother, lighter skin to the al­most exclusive female clientele. "I want my skin to be brighter and smoother," one lady in the shop explains, confirming the persistent perception among some women that lighter-skinned people are more beau­tiful or have a better social and economic status.

The shop vendor meanwhile is mixing different creams and lotions without any measuring tools, seemingly expert on what to use. "We give people lotions according to their skin," she says. Asked how they do that, she looks me up and instantly proposes the kind of lotion she thinks may work with my skin. Leaving the shop, I keep won­dering if any of the ladies there bother to ask what products are contained in the mixtures they are getting.

What people do not realize, according to Dr. Jeanne Kimo­nyo, a dermatologist at CHUK, is that many of these lotions have lightening products in them, even when it is not indi­cated on the containers. "I get quite a number of people who come to see me wondering why their skin is getting clearer," Ki­monyo says. Most of them say they are just using a simple lo­tion that they thought was free of any lightening agents.

The lightening products com­monly used in Rwanda contain hydroquinone and corticoste­roids. Although these products are used in cosmetics, they are also used in dermatology when treating some illnesses. "Cor­ticosteroids are used to treat people with inflammatory skin conditions, people who have spots that are darker than the rest of their skin," Kimonyo ex­plains.

Other people that are also treated with corticosteroids are those with a condition known as vitiligo – a skin condition in which there is a loss of brown pigment from areas of skin, resulting in irregular white patches that feel like normal skin. "Some of them feel really uncomfortable when there are only a few black/brown spots left, so we use corticosteroids to take them away. But it's all carefully done."

'Psychological scars'

There are many products that are available for the purpose of lightening skin. Some of these work by decreasing the amount of pigment that the body makes naturally, others claim to actu­ally bleach the skin while oth­ers work by killing melanin, the substance that lends skin its pigmentation and protects the skin from the cancer-caus­ing ultraviolet rays of the sun. Everyone has melanin in their skin; the more melanin present, the darker the skin.

"Personally, I would not dare use them," says Diane Uwera, another customer in the shop. "I prefer to use something that will not change me. In addi­tion, those products are really expensive, what happens when you can no longer afford them? I would be ashamed to get out of the house for people would be used to me being light and then I suddenly become dark."

The desire to change one skin's color is more than physi­cal. "The non-acceptance of your skin color or an attempt to make it lighter shows deep, ingrained psychological scars that have transcended gen­erations and will continue to transcend generations unless we declare to ourselves that we are happy with who we are," writes Derrick Johnson, a psychologist.

He continues: "The psycho­logical scarring is so deep that we don't even recognize it as being alien to our mentality. Instead we accept the world's perception of beauty and we despise our own. The accep­tance of feeling inferior is not recognized and so we harm ourselves in the pursuit of false beauty."

Yet skin lightening has many consequences in the long run. "People are looking for instant gratification, forgetting that they come with risks," says Ki­monyo.

As she explains, these prod­ucts can contain toxins such as mercury or potent steroids that can cause serious long-term adverse effects. "These effects can be especially significant be­cause of the large body surface that is involved. In short, when any chemical is used in large concentrations for long periods of time, there will be effects," she points out.

Hairy skin

When people are lightening their skins, those products are not only causing skin depig­mentation – destroying the sub­stances which give the skin its coloring – but also taking away layers of their skin, making it thin. This makes the skin more sensitive to the sun and, as it is less protected, it is easily at­tacked by bacteria and viruses that cause skin diseases.

The thinness of the skin also complicates the healing of wounds, Kimonyo says. "If it takes 5 days for normal people to heal, it will take that per­son 15 days." And the prod­ucts containing corticosteroids and hydroquinone can cause the skin to be more hairy, espe­cially the face. "They also cause acne and, in the end, lead to skin cancer," the dermatologist warns.

Some people who want to stop using lightening lotions find it very hard, and at times think they are allergic to any other lotion apart from the one they were using. "It's not al­lergies," Kimonyo says. "They just have been using them for so long, they become addicted. Like any other addiction, if you try to stop it suddenly, you will start itching and think it's be­cause you have changed prod­ucts."

Therefore, Kimonyo advises to get guidance from a derma­tologist who will help to stop using the products gradually.

But as one writer put it, the best way to help everyone in­volved is "to discourage the er­roneous belief that skin color affects beauty."

• Rwanda