Biomedical Opposition to Skin Lighteners

My paper will examine biomedical knowledge and government regulation of skin lighteners as it emerged between South Africa and the United States. Over the past seventy-five years, medical experts and activists in the two countries concerned about the active ingredients found in skin lighteners – most notably, mercury and hydroquinone – have frequently been in conversation and even collaboration. Yet, their efforts have produced different political results.

Beginning in the 1920s, American- (often African-American-) made skin lighteners were sold in South Africa. When the local manufacture of skin lighteners took off after World War II, South African businessmen looked to the United States for formulas. They closely followed U.S. medical research and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s regulations. Similarly, anti-skin lightener activists who emerged in South Africa during the 1970s engaged U.S. regulations and research to articulate their opposition. When the U.S. FDA banned ammoniated mercury from cosmetics in 1973, the South African government followed suit. During the 1980s, at the height of the anti-apartheid movement, however, medical and political opposition to skin lighteners in South Africa overtook that in the United States. Whereas the U.S. FDA restricted (and still does) concentrations of hydroquinone in cosmetics to 2 per cent, South African activists succeeded in 1990 in compelling their government to not only ban hydroquinone from cosmetics but to prohibit cosmetic manufacturers from advertising that any of their products could “bleach,” “lighten,” or “whiten.”

My paper will trace this linked but divergent history of biomedical knowledge and regulation. Developments in the United States exerted a tremendous influence on South Africa’s skin lighteners industry. Ultimately, however, political, social, and environmental particularities in apartheid South Africa combined to cause dermatologists there to view skin lighteners as more dangerous commodities than did their colleagues in the United States.