THE PROBLEM WITH SKIN-LIGTHENING

“I am not going to teach them how to die. It is not a game, it is not a joke, it is your life. I want to share my story to help sufferers and their families from repeating my fate. Anorexia has made me lonely, unattractive, and repulsive for the people around me. My eating disorder has robbed me of so much. People don’t want to be around someone who is not in good mood or not upbeat,” these were the frightening words of the thinnest woman in the world who only weighs 4s 3lbs, that is about 26kgs, after years of extreme dieting. The desire for a ‘celebrity body’ for her child made Valeria’s mum curtail her diet for fear that her daughter would grow up obese like most of her relatives, and this was not helped by Valeria’s desire to become a model. Today though, Valeria Levitin is a walking skeleton after years of anorexia that reduced her weight to just around 26kilos. And in the same way, I tend to have a problem with a majority of our ladies today, who are very beauty conscious but ignorant of the dangers of the products they use to achieve ‘beautiful’ skins. We have a generation of ladies who seem to value lighter skins over dark skins, and are busy exposing themselves to these deadly whitening creams, lotions and deadly injections to acquire a lighter skin tone. This they do inconsiderate of the dangers they are exposing themselves to. Be warned that one day things may backfire on you, and the side effects may be deadlier than you expected, and you will regret never appreciating that you were born beautiful. And who really taught ‘black’ girls to hate their dark skin? I mean, black is beautiful, and black is swag indeed. So if you were born dark-skinned, it would only be better that you maintained that, because in the real sense skin color does not really determine who we are. You will never be judged by the color of your skin but by the content of your character and how you behave. And in the same way and for the same reasons a guy would fall for a light-skinned girl, they would still fall for a dark-skinned girl because their character and behavior suit one another. When you walk along the corridors of campus, the streets of our towns and also in the villages, one may wonder if there still existed dark-skinned girls. All you meet are light-skinned girls, and some wearing fake hair- weaves and developed an accent that can only bore you. Don’t we have dark-skinned girls in Kenya who are proud of their skin tone and appreciate being black? Skin-lightening among ladies highlight the deeper underlying inter-related issues among our ladies. In a generation that copies almost everything, our have chosen to internalized the Western-created cultural ideas rather that adopt and maintain our own, which at times are always inimical to the mental health of black people. We hate ourselves so much that we dare change our entire complexion; we change the tone of our skins to look better which is never the case, and, continue to dismally suffer from a race-based identity crisis. Have you ever met those ladies with significantly lighter facial complexions than that of their hands and feet, or, ladies as light as Europeans yes, but with very dark knuckles, ears, elbows, and knees?- I would probably laugh about the image created above, but this is not a laughing matter. Ladies while you use some of these creams, do you ever stop to think of the dangers you are exposing your bodies? One thing for sure is that you always are placing yourself at a higher risk of permanently damaging your skin. Some of these creams can even cause skin cancer, while the frequent use of some may even lead to death. We were all wonderfully and marvelously created by God, and no matter where we were born, no matter who we are, or where we come from, or the color of our skins, or even what we look like, we all are beautiful in the eyes of God. So ladies stop this nonsense of going through so much to change your skin tone, because that is an insult to God in the first place. Instead ladies go through so much maintaining God’s creation- your dark-skinned look, and do not let the beauty which has been stereotyped to light skin push you into bleaching your black and beautiful African skin. Naturally Africans are dark-skinned, and we have to see the beauty in that for our own psychological well-being. Malcolm X once asked, “Who taught you to hate yourself? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the colour of your skin?” and to our dear beautiful and loving ladies, please do me a favour of having to answer Malcolm X Frankline Omondi, MMUST