Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners.

AuthorPotter, Amy E.

Thomas, Lynn M. Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Skin lightening products are projected to surpass $31 billion in global sales by 2024, with customers scattered around the world, mostly in the Global South. In Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, Lynn Thomas, a historian at the University of Washington, goes beyond the common question of "Why do people use them?" to explore the "knotty political and conceptual issues: issues of self-expression versus social control, informed choice versus false consciousness, and politics versus aesthetics" surrounding their use (3). Her study primarily centers on the South African context, where she examines the history of skin lighteners in a country where white-minority rule lasted the longest in Africa, and consumer spending has been strongest on the African continent.

In chapter 1, Thomas examines how precolonial and then-colonized people in southern Africa cared for their bodies, particularly exploring the role of whitening and lightening and how it eventually enmeshed with the racialized notions of colonialism. Chapter 2 is an analysis of the South African newspaper Bantu World and the ways editors represented female beauty through photo contests and Black women's use of skin lighteners and whiteners. Chapter 3 transitions from the global to the local by examining how South African pharmacists started making lighteners for a Black South African market. Chapter 4 then details the boom years of skin lightening in South Africa between 1940 and the 1970s, when the National Party strengthened apartheid rule, creating further restrictions on where one could live, attend school, and whom one could marry. Chapters 5 and 6 highlight the growing alternatives to conceptions of beauty in South Africa with the rise of anti-racist politics and "Black is Beautiful" in the United States, African Nationalism, and growing medical concerns about the damaging effects of skin lightener use. Chapter 6 details how the political and health critiques discussed in the previous two chapters that had been quite separate joined together, with grassroots consumers and women's groups aligned with biomedical professionals to oppose skin lighteners. This led to South Africa ultimately banning any cosmetic that claimed to bleach, lighten, or whiten skin on August 10, 1990. Thomas concludes with a discussion of South Africa's expansive...

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