What is the Deal between Young Nigerians and Bleaching Creams?
From Mhiz ChindyPie to Suliyat, to Kween Aminah, all across states and borders, these skin-like-butter babes are constantly cooking Africa's deadliest toxins as molatto whitening creams....
I know I said thou must not judge, else, you open yourself to be judged, bhet at this rate I cannot keep it to myself any longer. I need to say this, to put it off my chest. It is choking me, attempting to asphyxiate me. And this is about the incredible surge in the numbers of Nigerians, young wild potentials who find immense joy in bleaching creams and other bleaching products.
No, this is not a sub post to yahoo boys even if the ones in my area are largely the muse that spurred this post. I do not desire to spend the next few hours of my life writing about people whose existence is inconsequential to me. I am indifferent towards people whose job and life ambition is to cause other people hurt in every way possible.
So, replace yahoo boys with any being you like; preferably Olori Wire – which is how we refer to low ambition, schizophrenic ladies who dates yahoo boys, fresh out-of-secondary-school boys and girls, undergraduates, working class ladies, or anyone else who comes to your mind.
Let us break it down a bit so that we won’t make hasty generalizations. If you are a fair or light-skinned person, you definitely do not have enough melanin, hence, the creams and skin products that suits your skin are just the type needed to maintain your skin tone and keep it even so that you will not be sunburned or look like someone who is passing through this Nigerian economic hardship.
On the other side, if you are born black, as in African black beauty kind of black, wallai, even if it is just shea butter and palm kernel oil that you are using to rub your skin, it will still glow and you will look as beautiful as nature designed you to be.
If your skin color is brown or somewhere between not-too-black or fair-skinned, what you should be concerned about is maintaining such skin tone!
Keeping your skin smooth, clear, even, and optimally moisturized should be your goal not that vain attempt at looking like black Americans or taking the madness a top notch higher, by trying to turn yourself white.
I do not know if I give people the impression that I care about what they do with their skin. Honestly, I don’t. My compassion radar can be so limited at times that it borderline disturbs me. If you are not my friend – virtual, physical, and celestial – or my family members, or by extension people who reads me – my subscribers, I really do not have the luxury of carrying your feelings in my heart. Which is a very simple way of saying that I do not care about what you do with your skin.
Despite my position on people’s feelings, I strongly believe that it is part of my job description to educate the public. Compassion is a core part of medicine, it is why health workers – students and practicing – do not get to segregate or stigmatize people. So, as much as I try to form hard guy, there is that part of me that is expected to spontaneously be interested in helping people medically, even if they are the sole cause of their medical ailment.
Now that I have cleared my conscience and put out the disclaimer, let us briefly talk about bleaching creams and why they are not good for you.
Bleaching creams are actually toxic chemicals. I do not even need a degree in toxicology or chemical engineering to say this. Right from the way bleaching creams are locally prepared in Nigeria, right down to the ingredients, end results, and largely, the consequences of their usage, everything about it screams, “I need to start saving money for a new kidney, and that is if skin cancer doesn’t finish me first”.
These creams are dangerous to your body in many ways. I feel like if you are healthy enough to waltz into the dermatology ward of hospitals or the nephrology unit, and you see people whose conditions solely is because of their own afowofa, and you are lucky enough to interact with them, then not even Lucifer will have the willpower to convince you that bleaching creams are a good thing.
The first thing bleaching cream does is to make you vulnerable by peeling away layers and layers of your dermis. Your dermis is the outermost part of your skin, it is the part everyone sees and can touch. It is also on this dermis that microorganisms helping you fight off toxic substances, antigens, that lands on your skin lives.
So, it starts by making you defenseless. Then, as you use them, rubbing these skin products, letting your skin soak them in like nutrients, they take the destruction a little bit higher into your epidermis and subcutaneous tissues. It alters your melanin and hinders the production of more melanin, which simply means that you stop being black and your subsequent skin cells come up toneless.
Of course, your skin cannot utilize all these chemicals, hence, after the constituents in these skin products have started doing their job in your skin, your body especially the excretory system will try to collect all the waste and the toxicity together so that it can remove them before they do more harm, and that is where the kidney comes in.
As long as you use these products, the cycle repeats itself: you lose layers of dermis, alter your epidermis, your kidney tries to remove the toxins from your body, and the circle starts again. The sad part is when your body in its natural instincts tries to fight off the effects of the bleaching cream, it loses because you the owner of the body is repeatedly the one causing the destruction.
And when your body cannot take it anymore, when it has screamed, “Help me! Help me! I no know where this bleaching cream dey carry me dey go o” tirelessly and nothing changes, you start to see the effects, the dangers of bleaching, and the problems that sometimes money isn’t enough to solve.
We all know that Africa experiences more sunny days than some continents and the sun actually causes sun burns. I mean, the sun that is up there is literally trying to kill us all – how ironic. Our melanin, that blackness in our skin is the only thing protecting us from the harsh realities of what the sun can do to us.
When you alter the natural state of your skin, you lose your melanin, you exposes yourself to more sun burns, myiasis, and a hundred other dermatological issues including skin cancer. When your kidneys tries to expel the toxins, they counteract the normal workings of the nephrons and tubules. The toxins literally and aggressively tries to shut your kidneys down, which is when the person affected starts to experience symptoms and signs of kidney failure.
If you read all I wrote up to this point, I know that there would be the urge to ask some questions; “but I know someone that has been using dghbghf (a brand of bleaching products) and this person is very much fine”, “but the person that recommended ghbgbhf to me is using it too and nothing is going wrong”, “but Mummy Dami that sold it to me said it is organic and there is nothing bad in it”.
Yes, your questions if they are along that line are pretty much valid but that doesn’t mean they are scientifically correct. Our body systems works in marvelous ways; which is why Boda Nuru might have been using a particular kind of bleaching products for years and still looked fine, yet Bisola would use the products for only ten years and land in a hospital bed waiting for a miracle kidney.
The person that recommended the product to you might have a more rugged body system than you. It is just the same way that if you put three persons inside a mosquito-infested room, there is a probability that the three of them won’t fall sick at the same time. It doesn’t mean that the mosquitoes in the room are biting only the one that first fell sick.
Thirdly, that something is organic doesn’t mean it is safe or harmless. Our bodies are composed of organic matter – a balanced composition of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and other micro elements. Anything that is organic means it can easily decompose back into these elements. Yet, in the wrong composition, these elements will wreck the biggest havoc.
If there is too less oxygen in the lungs, a man will become hypoxic. If the nitrogen in the blood is beyond normal, it will cause death. Carbon monoxide kills faster than malaria. That something is organic or only contain organic substances doesn’t equate to being safe.
There is no justification to using bleaching creams – apart from the fact that maybe they help people feel more beautiful about themselves, which is actually a bullshit way of saying “my self-esteem is in the gutter, I need to look like A so that people can tell me nice things that I have yearned to hear about myself and because of that I will love myself better”.
There is no way that bleaching creams will disappear from the markets. I mean, alcohol, and a thousand other dangerous substances are still being marketed and there is no jack to that. But I believe that by now you should and cannot claim ignorance to how bleaching products work.
It is your skin and it is your money, and honestly, apart from the fact that such person would be taking up spaces and beds and hospital resources, it is also your health that is in question here.
As I have said somewhere in the beginning of today’s newsletter; keeping your skin smooth, clear, even skin tone, and optimally moisturized should be the goal. Use not only registered skin products but the ones that basically doesn’t alter it.
If you want to glow effortlessly, I will strongly advise that you eat good and balanced meals, avoid working under the sun, have a healthy skin care routine, exercise, have a consistent check up with your dermatologist, and use iPhone to take your pictures.
The end.
If you like what you just read, drop a comment if possible. Share this newsletter with your friends and family, even if they are not using bleaching creams. Yes, knowledge is power. Please subscribe and I will write about another health related topic in a fortnight….
What if I don't have iPhone 🤣🤣🤣
Thanks for this👍
You write knowledge skillfully