When I was doing my research, I found the only research that had been done about it, around 2005, from the Director General for Ghana Health Services. He had done an extensive report, and at the time it said about 30% of all Ghanaian men had bleached at one point and about 45% of Ghanaian women had at one point bleached their skin. And that was 10 years ago. I’ve now heard of official data that says it’s over 60%. I remember at the end of the report, it said something needs to be done about this. And I realized that no one had done anything. And I thought maybe being a celebrity with my voice, you know, if you wear an outfit they don’t like it becomes a story. So this campaign was essentially to get the dialogue going. I pulled a few other female celebrities together and we did a photoshoot with Rodney Kweku, an amazing photographer. We shot it, put up billboards, and from there did school visits, and we’re still on it.
Even though we didn’t have major money to put up huge billboards everywhere, it was important to me to put some up because there’s so many that you see with the message of “perfect white,” “live your dreams with your white skin,” all those nonsense ads. And the message was simple on [our billboards]: “I love my natural skin tone. Say no to skin bleaching.” That was it. There were so many of those messages bombarding you to lighten your skin, that let us, with our smaller billboards, let us with our little selves make that foundation. I’ve seen girls’ schools where there are skin whitening billboards next to them. I’m like, why, why? Can you imagine as a girl you go to school and that’s the message you’re getting? So it was important for us to put up billboards just to counter that message with “I love my natural skin tone.”
Usually when we go to schools it’s a little lecture hall; we get anywhere from 50 to 150 people. I’ve gone with other celebrities, and usually there’s a doctor there to give the scientific breakdown since I’m not a medical professional. We just dialogue, we have a very open discussion, we ask questions, and they can ask us anything. We ask who’s done it before and we try to dispel some of the notions people have. A lot of the girls say girls do it because guys like light-skinned girls. In every session I’ve been in, the guys will say, “No no no, it doesn’t matter.” The girls will say the guys are lying. I’ve had a girl stand up once and say she did it, and she said she stopped because it became too expensive. Some of them come up to you after, saying, “Oh I really wanted to speak but I didn’t want to be judged. But, yeah, I did it but I’m gonna stop.”
And I’ve said one of the major things since starting the campaign: this is not a skin-bleaching police, it’s not about who’s done it, who’s doing it, who’s done it before. It wasn’t a judgmental campaign because you’re not going to gain anything from it. It’s not a campaign to gain money. It’s the elephant in the room in our society. We all see it, but it wasn’t being spoken about enough. I’m really happy, a lot of radio shows, TV shows, have spoken about it, a lot of people were passionate about it, some people released songs about it.
The Ghana Food and Drug Authority contacted us and they said they’d been working on getting hydroquinone banned, and when they saw our billboards they were so happy. When they saw the celebrities on the billboard, they were happy that someone was taking the initiative. They had been working on it before, it was in their plan. The man who spoke to us, he was driving and he saw our billboard and he had to stop his car and he was like, “Wow.” The Ghana Food and Drug Authority are very seriously about banning hydroquinone and other forms of skin lightening. Hydroquinone has been highlighted, some of the dangers. They want to eradicate it now. I pray. I think the ban comes into effect in August. It’ll be interesting to see if it really works, but we’ll see. I remember the day we read they gave them a certain amount of months to reformulate, I was just so happy. It’s a little step, but at least it’s a way. I’m not under any illusion that skin-bleaching will be out of the country in six months’ time. It could take 10, 20, 30, 40 [years], who knows? Think about how long it took the situation to get to here.
Credit: thefader.com
Ama K. Abebrese"s Research on Skin Toning
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