“Now I have visibly fairer skin, making me feel younger,” declares the Nigerian actor Omowunmi Akinnifesi in an advert for a new face cream. The ad, for the global skincare brand Nivea, was only ever intended to reach a west African audience, but predictably – has Nivea heard of the internet? – it has been watched and shared millions of times around the world including in the UK, where most of us live in blissful ignorance of the fact that some of our most popular brands openly promote the idea in other markets that white is right.
Nivea says the ad was not intended to offend, but offence is not the point. The global market for skin lightening products, of which west Africa is a significant part, is worth $10bn (£7.6bn). Advertising has a long and unbroken history of promoting and normalising white beauty standards, and if Britain built its empire as a geopolitical and ideological project, the advertising industry commodified it. Soap brands such as Pears built a narrative that cast Africa as dark and its people as dirty, the solution to which – conveniently – was soap. Cleansing, lightening and civilising in one handy bar.
These days the marketing has become much more sophisticated. Ads speak of “toning” as code for whitening. Lancôme, which a few years ago got in trouble for using Emma Watson’s image to market its Blanc Expert line in Asia, emphasised that it does not lighten, but rather “evens skin tone, and provides a healthy-looking complexion … an essential part of Asian women’s beauty routines”.
Social media has become a new battle ground. The photography industry only bothered developing the technology to lighten black skin historically because of complaints over poor light calibration from makers of brown furniture. Today, Snapchat’s retouching tools, whether adding flowers, bunny features or Frida Kahlo filters, can make your skin several shades lighter too. Facebook apologised for a similar innovation earlier this year.
Shadism, pigmentocracy – the idea of privilege accruing to lighter-skinned black people – and other hierarchies of beauty are a complex picture in which ads such as Nivea’s are only the obvious tip of an insidious iceberg. Celebrities with darker complexions, such as the Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech – nicknamed Queen of the Dark – and actors such as Lupita Nyong’o, are so often discussed in the context of having achieved the seemingly impossible by being both dark and beautiful, that they become the exceptions that prove the rule.
It is often observed that light-skinned black women are more likely to become global superstars, the Beyoncé-Rihanna effect. They are, however, still black women and therefore not immune from the pressure to lighten – most recently by fans following a new Photoshopping trend of posting pictures of whitened versions of their faces and remarking upon the improvement.
In countries such as Ghana, the intended audience for the Nivea ad, and Nigeria – where an estimated 77% of women use skin-lightening products – the debate has so far, understandably, focused on health. The most toxic skin-lightening ingredients, still freely available, include ingredients such as hydroquinone, mercury and corticosteroid. It’s not unusual for these to be mixed with caustic agents ranging from automotive battery acid, washing power, toothpaste and cloth bleaching agents, with serious and irreversible health consequences.
There is no suggestion that global brands such as Nivea or Lancôme are using any of these illegal and harmful ingredients, and African countries are moving towards greater regulation of the products themselves. Ghana, for example, has banned hydroquinone.
These powerful corporations are, however, still freely operating in a context where millions of low-income women experience the high-end messaging of their glossy billboards, but can only afford to opt for cheaper, black market products.
Advertising standards have been enforced against beauty conglomerates for adverts that are overly retouched, but only India, another of the biggest markets for skin lightening products, has banned adverts depicting people with darker skin as inferior. Maybe it is time that changed. This is an industry expected to reach $31bn by 2024, as growing awareness of dangerous, toxic products drives extra demand for a “fairness solution with natural, herbal and organic ingredients”, according to market analysts.
As such, Nivea’s ad with its clever Natural Fairness branding is bang on trend. The product itself may be safe to use, but the messaging that sells it is as deeply poisonous as ever.
*****
I am an audiobook evangelist. It’s no exaggeration. I reckon I convert an average of two people a week to my new way of life, often busy working parents like me who lament the radically altered ratio of domestic tasks to time spent reading.
I’m not on commission – though maybe I should be – but this week I discovered that I am part of a new subculture I didn’t know existed, the “ultra hardcore” reader. This new identity of mine is described, rather appealingly, as a restless tribe of millennials which “optimises intellectual consumption by utilising transitional moments” to consume books. In other words, we listen to audiobooks while cleaning the sink.
It’s less original than I thought. The audiobook industry is booming. A report last December estimated the industry was worth £91m, based on almost 11m units sold in 2015. The Publishers Association puts the value at less, but says that audiobook downloads in the UK increased by more than a quarter in 2016.
No surprise perhaps then that this week the Canadian company Audiobook is launching into the UK market with a catalogue of 70,000 titles, providing the Amazon-owned Audible with some much needed competition. Audible makes so many audiobooks that, at one point, its founder boasted that it was the biggest employer of actors in the New York City area. As the New York Times put it, today’s actors don’t read for the part, reading is the part.
When I looked up why audiobooks are so popular, Google thought I wanted to know why they are expensive – and they are, often double or triple the cost of the average e-book. I can’t help wondering how much those actors are getting paid.
*****
I often find myself advocating a better vocabulary for discussing issues of race and identity. It’s not about political correctness, but rather accuracy, appropriateness and sophistication. “BAME” serves a useful purpose in the media and public policy as a way of talking about black and minority ethnic people, but it’s worth remembering that no one brushing their teeth in the morning looks in the mirror and sees a BAME person gazing back at them. When someone describes a TV show, as I heard this week, as including “two white people and one diverse person”, then I know we have a problem.
Diversity is not an identity and being white is not its opposite, but that’s obviously not clear to everyone. Now that “what is diversity” is one of most frequently searched phrases online, I reckon – when it comes to understanding the concept – a bit of homogeneity is in order.
