Creams Offering Lighter Skin May Bring Risks

[ccharles000]

For years, Allison Ross rubbed in skin-lightening creams with names like Hyprogel and Fair & White. She said she wanted to even out and brighten the tone of her face, neck and hands. Mrs. Ross, 45, who lives in Brooklyn, also said that she used the lightening creams “to be more accepted in society.”

After months of twice-a-day applications, her skin was not only fairer, it had become so thin that a touch would bruise her face. Her capillaries became visible, and she developed stubborn acne. A doctor told her that all three were side effects of prescription-strength steroids in some of the creams, which she had bought over the counter in beauty supply stores.

“I never read the labels,” Mrs. Ross said. Instead, she took her cues from friends, many of them, like her, from the West Indies. “Once somebody told me Fair & White was the one they were using, I’d go to the Korean store and ask for it,” she said.

Dermatologists nationwide are seeing women of Hispanic and African descent, among others, with severe side effects like Mrs. Ross’s from the misuse of skin-lightening creams, many with prescription-strength ingredients, which are sold in beauty shops and bodegas and online.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/health/16skin.html?pagewanted=1

[SheilaT]

1. Why in the world are

prescription strength levels of steroids available in over-the-counter products?

[Warpy]

3. Lots of things that are illegal to sell here appear on ethnic market shelves

A case in point was some stuff we used to call "Chinese chalk," an insecticide you'd draw across surfaces where you suspected roaches were nesting. You'd sweep up dead roaches for a week and those suckers would be gone, although they'd move back in a couple of months. We always suspected there was probably something ultra nasty in it like chlordane. I haven't seen it since the late 80s.

Likewise, ethnic butcher shops often carry alternative meats in the back and high phosphate detergents with labels in foreign languages. The items are brought in by travelers or simply shipped in by the case and customs is too overwhelmed to do anything but a drug sniff and a spot check.

I'm not a bit surprised by this. I'm a little saddened, though.

[malaise]

2. I have no sympathy for these morons

Darwin works wonders. There's a lot of this bleaching in India as well. We had an epidemic of it here in Jamaica and everything the doctors said (and there was a public campaign) was ignored.
If regulators were serious they'd lock up the people selling this crap and the fools buying it.

[BunkerHill24]

4. I've seen this on my own eyes

my visits to Kenya, Central Africa and India led me to believe that there was huge usage of these products. I'm glad though that the local governments are doing concerted effort to warn and educate the population.

[ccharles000]

5. kick