Cosmetic Advertisements, Transnational Connections, and Personal Fantasies

My presentation will consider the possibilities and challenges of using advertisements to write the history of skin lighteners in apartheid South Africa. Given that many skin lightener manufacturers were small companies that seldom preserved their records and that only a few users of skin lighteners have produced testimonials, ads are among the most compelling documentary and visual sources for the emergence of skin lighteners as a commonplace commodities. During the 1950s and 1960s, the popular black photo-magazines Zonk! and Drum carried five or more skin lightener ads, often full page and in color. Examination of these ads reveals the transnational connections and marketing logics that animated the trade. U.S. companies licensed many of the skin lighteners manufactured in South Africa and ads often emphasized these American affiliations as a selling point. Moreover, ads that appeared in the Accra, Lagos, and Nairobi editions of Drum demonstrate how South African companies worked to create an “African” market for skin lighteners. South African skin lightener ads promised self-improvement by featuring African and African American music and film stars, and beauty queens. Why and how consumers actually used skin lighteners, of course, cannot easily be read from ads. African consumers often engaged commodities in ways not imagined by their marketers. In the case of skin lightener ads, however, clues to their reception can be found in the beauty contests sponsored by their manufacturers. Consideration of how such contests played in the pages of Zonk! and Drum, and how contest winners subsequently featured in ads reveals how racialized beauty ideals and personal fantasies of betterment enabled skin lighteners to become a lucrative and controversial business in apartheid South Africa.