People In Kenya Are Injecting Their Skin With Bleaching Cream To Show Wealthy Status

World • Sean Levinson •

The fastest-growing cosmetic craze in Kenya is going to beauty salons get injections of creams to make skin look whiter and younger.
The long-term health risks of the injections have yet to be documented, but their high mercury content is evoking mass concern from health officials.
According to Vice, beauticians claim the injections can make people look six years younger and their skin 10 shades lighter. It’s rumored that anything more than the tiny amount of the creams they use could turn someone’s skin as white as an albino.
Harvard-educated dermatologist Dr. Pranav Pancholi of the Shah Hospital says that the Nairobi back streets where the injections take place has seen a huge increase in clients over the past year, mostly because any serious side effects haven’t been publicized.
He told Vice
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The products used on the streets are not used by certified professionals. The trade in black market creams and injections is completely unregulated. There is no way of knowing just how dangerous they are.

It’s illegal to offer skin-bleaching injections at an unlicensed salon in Kenya, but most of the shop owners have managed to avoid jail by bribing authorities.
The shops are located along River Road in between brothels, bars and DVD retailers.
Beauticians sit on stools or stand in doorways outside their shops beckoning passersby.
Injections cost roughly $70 each, which is almost what most Kenyans make in a month. One beautician named Rose told Vice that most of her clients are rich and sometimes famous.

Many are Somali or Indian. But, those ones never come to my shop. They send a driver with a photo of their skin color and I supply what they need.

Rose explained that, after five years of regular injections, most of her body is much lighter except for remnants of her previous skin color on her knuckles and elbows.
Her next customer told Vice that she is getting her injections to please her husband and that Kenyan men have long been enamored by white skin.

My husband prefers half-caste women to darker girls, and he is proud to be mine when we go to the club. I get far more male attention now I am lighter.

The packaging of the pink liquid Rose injects states that it should be applied as a cream and results should appear in one to two weeks. Rose’s client says the cream did brighten her skin after years of use, but not to the dramatic degree of the injections.
The cream contains alpha hydroxy acids, which Dr. Pranav says can cause infections and kill body tissue, causing flesh to thin and decompose.
But Rose’s client, a woman in her mid-20s, says the social status her new skin has given her easily evaporates any hesitation in terms of health scares.

Nairobi is very competitive and Kenyan men like women with whiter skin.

She plans to continue the injections and possibly seek even riskier treatment until she is as white as the European tourists male Kenyans gawk at.
via Vice, Photo Courtesy: Tumblr