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By Jackson Biko
There is a lady who I bump into quite often because we share many things; the same office block, the same parking lot, the same elevator and – I’m certain – Makau also provides her with chapatti at 10am. So, inevitably, I usually run into her at least thrice a week. She is not a bad looking lady but you can tell that she has to work a bit harder to bring out her good side.
You know… some eyeliner here, a plunging neckline there, a fancy hairstyle on some days and, once in a while, a heart-stopping skirt that shows just enough flesh to get a red-blooded man to walk into a pillar.
But over time, I have realised that something peculiar is going on with her. It’s like she is undergoing a transformation of the Michael Jackson variety. She seems to be getting lighter-skinned every day. She is starting to look like a back-up singer in some small-time Congolese band in downtown Kinshasa.
Up close, she looks like someone tried to microwave her face (and darn near succeeded, too!) because it looks all tender and sore. I will be honest; it breaks my heart a little every time I see her because she reminds me of a newborn hamster. She needn’t ravage her face like that in order to look lighter just because someone once told her that rubbish story about men liking light women. Colonial thinking
This baffling fascination with white skin is not only a problem here; quite recently, L’Oreal, the giant beauty product company, caused a royal stink when they digitally altered Beyonce’s image to give her lighter skin and make her appear ‘white’. And there are many more cases that point to the perceived “superiority” of a “lighter” face.
In India, women strive to achieve the ‘wheat’ colour much requested on Asian dating websites. In the Caribbean, light skin is the preferred colour. Closer home, I’d imagine that when night falls on the streets, and the working girls come out in their high heels and gaudy outfits, the light-skinned women get more business than their darker counterparts.
Bleaching is born from the primitive thinking that the lighter you are, the closer you are to being white and thus the more appealing you are. It’s one of the degenerate and horrifying remnants of colonisation, where societies were brainwashed to believe that the lighter you were, the higher your status was, socially and economically.
But is light skin really better? It is visually attractive because it will draw attention.
Anything beyond that is debatable and largely a matter of personal preference. Besides, skin colour is such a fickle standard because past the colour, you might be shocked at the cocktail of vanity and indifference that lives beneath. Many light-skinned women get away with murder.
Overrated
They have it easy because most men are likely to cut them some slack. It’s like tall men who, according to some research I once read, most people are predisposed to regard highly (excuse the pun) but who otherwise aren’t as useful as imagined… except when light bulbs need changing, or when someone needs to fetch the cornflakes from the top shelf.
Light-skinned women are striking, yes, but most have had their way for so long and with such success that they seem to have stopped applying themselves. They don’t care what you think of them because the next guy on the street will drop his jaw on the floor when they pass by. Don’t get your knickers in a twist, though; I’m not saying brown women are vapid, I’m just saying they are overrated.
Winds of change
Fortunately, the appreciation of dark complexions seems to be picking. A few years ago, the fashion heavyweight, Italian Vogue magazine, broke one of the fashion’s world taboos by featuring only black models in one issue, a most significant message to black models and people. The editor said her decision was influenced by, amongst other factors, the election of President Obama. And that’s change we can believe in.
There is no need for a woman to go through the indignity of bleaching her face. Most bleaching creams contain hydroquinone and/or mercury that has been linked to a disfiguring condition called ochronosis, an ugly condition (and word) which is marked by the darkening and thickening of the skin. So, you might lighten your skin and attract the men, but you will have to do a lot more than apply mercury on your face to keep them around when they touch your skin and realise that it is thicker than their mechanic’s palms.
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