Racked: All Posts by Zoé SamudziThe National Shopping, Stores, and Retail Scene Bloghttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52809/32x32.0..png2018-04-26T07:00:01-04:00https://www.racked.com/authors/zoe-samudzi/rss2018-04-26T07:00:01-04:002018-04-26T07:00:01-04:00The Encoded Racist Messages of Skin Care Marketing
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<figcaption>Photo: Cecile Lavabre/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>When what’s being sold is “brightening,” it can sound suspiciously like “whitening.” </p> <p class="p--has-dropcap p-large-text" id="QXwogf">Recently, while I was scrolling through Instagram, I stumbled upon one of Neutrogena’s recent advertisements for a deep cleanser. The ad consists of a smiling, product-wielding blonde white woman and bolded graphic words that read: “Go beyond clean. Purify.” </p>
<p id="f2mbRi">At first glance, the advertisement’s messaging is clear enough: This isn’t your normal face wash! This is a product that will bring you a level of clean beyond anything you’re used to! But the meaning surrounding language like “cleansing” and “cleanliness” and “purity,” even in the context of something as ordinary as an exfoliation routine, is not as innocuous as it seems — particularly when coupled with images of the seemingly flawless white (and light-skinned nonwhite) women that are mainstays in these advertisements. </p>
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<cite>Via Instagram</cite>
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<p id="J99xlL">There seems to be a clear distinction between the practice of someone desiring a lighter complexion and using skin bleaching products and someone having an otherwise “healthy” relationship to their coloring. But there is unspoken messaging in the images we’re bombarded with that seem to elevate colonial and white-aspiring beauty standards: the actual process of whitening. </p>
<p id="SoYOZZ">Whitening is social conditioning wherein people internalize the ideal that “white is right” and “white is most beautiful.” Beauty campaigns replete with grinning white (and fairer-skinned nonwhite) women convey the message that clear, bright, light skin begets a happy and beautiful woman; the messaging in these campaigns can be understood as part of a larger practice of social engineering where strategies are employed to influence attitudes and social practice within wider society.</p>
<p id="mq7GRW">And the visuals are not simply advertised to white, Western consumers. <a href="https://go.redirectingat.com?id=66960X1514733&xs=1&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.telegraph.co.uk%2Fwomen%2Fwomens-life%2F10973359%2FNot-all-African-women-believe-black-is-beautiful.-And-thats-OK.html&referrer=racked.com&sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.racked.com%2F2018%2F4%2F26%2F17253494%2Fskin-care-racism-whiteness-beauty-neutrogena-nivea" rel="sponsored nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Nigeria</a> is one of the world’s largest markets for skin lightening products; Cameroonian pop star Dencia created her own “dark spot remover,” <a href="http://www.ebony.com/entertainment-culture/dencia-wants-to-set-the-record-straight-on-whitenicious-interview-453">Whitenicious</a>, in 2014, whose first run sold out in just 24 hours. Fair skin is a commodity in Thailand, with one company, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/23/thailand-vaginal-whitening-wash">Lactacyd</a>, even marketing a lightening product to women that claims to “keep intimate parts fresh and young.” </p>
<p id="T6BYs3"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/jul/16/unilever-hypocritical-promoting-skin-lightening">Unilever</a>, a Netherlands-based company, is making billions of dollars every year through its near monopoly on the skin lightening market alone. It owns Pond’s, Fair & Lovely (a product popular in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2013/aug/14/indias-dark-obsession-fair-skin">Indian</a> and Southeast Asian cosmetic markets), and the Filipino product Block & White, as well as the range of Vaseline and Dove’s whitening products. And beyond these familiar images exists whitening as deliberate state policy.</p>
<div class="c-float-right c-float-hang"><aside id="1zwbYW"><q>The concept of skin purity has been fraught and painful for a long time because of its roots in white supremacy</q></aside></div>
<p id="FflIAr">The concept of skin purity has been fraught and painful for a long time because of its roots in white supremacy. Blanqueamiento (or branqueamento in Portuguese), which means “whitening,” was the name of both official and unofficial policy in a number of Latin American countries, including Brazil and Cuba, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This state-sponsored policy was a solution to the “Negro problem,” or the large Black/African-descendant populations in many Latin American states resulting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. </p>
<p id="WcQPLc">Biologically, the whitening process was enacted through darker-skinned people marrying lighter-skinned people to produce lighter-skinned offspring, and the importance of whitening was messaged through social discourses and government policy. The campaign’s success would be signaled by the eventual elimination of blackness and dark skin, leaving a population marked by the dominance and continued existence of “superior” European/white genes. The Cuban government, for example, invested millions of dollars in trying to coax white Spaniards to the island: Between 1902 and 1907, approximately 128,000 white Spaniards had moved there. But most of them did not resettle permanently, and so by the 1920s, the policy was eventually halted and deemed a failure.</p>
<p id="1brsmK">The racial project with which we are most familiar is probably Nazi eugenics. Driving the genocidal machine was a “scientific” framework distinguishing the genetically superior “pure” from the inferior “impure.” Racial mixing was strictly forbidden and banned by the Nuremberg Laws, which were racial laws that regulated social interactions. The Nazi regime gave rise to the lexicon of “cleansing” and “purity” most clearly associated with whiteness in the Western world (despite the United States’ own shameful history of anti-miscegenation policy and its <a href="https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php">influence and funding of Nazi racial hygiene science</a>). </p>
<p id="UpbuIM">In fact, the German skin care brand Nivea, which has come under fire for its own <a href="http://www.adweek.com/creativity/nivea-apologizes-wanting-re-civilize-black-man-134226/">racist advertising</a> and whose executive board cooperated with the Nazi regime during World War II, derives its brand name from the Latin word niveus<em>,</em> meaning “snow white.” Whether snow whiteness alludes to the color of the creams or the color of the brand’s ideal consumer is more ambiguous, though the “white is purity” language within a <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2017/04/05/news/companies/nivea-white-is-purity-racist-ad/index.html">yanked 2017 advertisement</a> (with yet another apology for accidental racism) crystallized the potential meaning. </p>
<p id="qDgLiM">The language of the Neutrogena advertisement becomes particularly alarming in a historical context in which “cleanse” and “purify” connote mass murder, involuntary sterilization, and colonial politics where human worth is assessed based on color and ethnic identity.</p>
<p id="h9eWH3">In this present beauty moment, the South Korean industry is <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/11/health/korean-makeup-beauty-health-benefits/index.html">heralded as the future of cosmetics</a>. Where youthful dewy skin is, in many spaces, the foundation of a casual daytime look, the affordable and hydration-heavy (and often extensive) K-beauty routines have become fast favorites. The general function of these routines is to “brighten” the skin or to fight hyperpigmentation and “dullness.” But with some containing vitamin C, arbutin, and kojic acid — all “brightening” ingredients — they’re not a far cry from the skin whitening and bleaching creams and lotions that form the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjzvvgmg1NU">global multibillion-dollar industry</a> at the center of conversations about beauty and shadeism. In fact, <a href="https://theklog.co/what-whitening-means-in-korean-beauty/">many Korean products are labeled as “whitening,”</a> even though they don’t contain bleach, per se. </p>
<p id="hRtusr">We must also reconcile that the increasing popularity of this “brightening”-saturated cosmetic market is emerging from an ethnically homogeneous country (South Korea is about 96 percent ethnically Korean) where ethnocentrism, <a href="http://www.thelostdaughters.com/2016/07/dark-skin-light-masks-colorism-as.html">colorism</a>, and <a href="https://africasacountry.com/2013/12/antiblack-racism-in-korea/">anti-black racism</a> run rampant, though <a href="https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/02/ending-anti-blackness-asian/">it is not unique</a> in any of these politics.</p>
<aside id="Z4QKE1"><div data-anthem-component="newsletter" data-anthem-component-data='{"slug":"racked_national"}'></div></aside><p id="QACBQ6">“Good” skin, like “good” hair for black women, is both an objective and a subjective metric: They are both ubiquitous messages that “just make sense” based on a seemingly shared understanding of what simply “looks nice.” One intersection of misogynoir and shadeism was evident in a <a href="http://time.com/4974452/dove-ad-facebook-racist/">2017 Dove commercial</a> in which a black woman, after using the product, strips off her shirt and is transformed, freshly “cleansed,” into a white woman. This ad is part of a long <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/tunedin/the-history-of-racist-soap-ads/vi-AAtgVeu">history of American soap products</a> using visual transformations from stereotypical depictions of blackness to whiteness to signify effectiveness. </p>
<p id="1tXU8H">The fetish for orderly hair and unblemished complexion did not materialize out of nowhere. “Good” hair is not simply about tidiness, but rather a dislike for the natural textures of black hair, even to the point of institutions <a href="https://www.racked.com/2017/5/25/15685456/hair-policing-schools-braids-afros">outright banning Afros, dreadlocks, braids, and cornrows</a> for breaching dominant standards of <a href="https://www.racked.com/2018/3/8/17096202/women-poc-office-dress-code-professional-attire">professionalism</a>. “Good” skin speaks not only to clear skin but to skin that is fair and lovely (literally the name of a “fairness” cream and the reactive <a href="https://www.self.com/story/the-unfair-and-lovely-campaign-is-embracing-darker-skin-tones">Unfair and Lovely</a> social media campaign in which South Asian women celebrated the beauty of their dark skin).</p>
<p class="c-end-para" id="0FyVMN">Politics around racially “pure” populations inform all of the beauty and aesthetic-related aspects of our lives. It would behoove us as consumers to interrogate deeply how they are messaged to us, what that messaging truly means, and how we both project and internalize it.</p>
https://www.racked.com/2018/4/26/17253494/skin-care-racism-whiteness-beauty-neutrogena-niveaZoé Samudzi