In many parts of the world today there is a profitable market for products which lighten or whiten people’s skin. Outline the reasons for such products and discuss what effects they have in terms of health and society. Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own experience or knowledge.
For the past few years, there is a great demand for beauty products, especially for different brands of fairness cream, which makes the cosmetics industry become one of the multi-million dollar ones. My essay will critically present main reasons for the immense popularity of these merchandises as well as the influences they have on people’s health and society.
To begin with, the strong desire for using skin-whitening products among people from many countries is probably defined by the psychological and social factors. From the emotional perspective, bright colors seem to be associated with positive feelings such as hope, happiness or success while dark ones may provoke negative senses namely loss, fear or dissatisfaction. As a result, people tend to prefer a fair complexion to a swarthy one, thereby buying skin-care creams to satisfy their aspiration. In terms of social aspect, the concept of beauty is built in connection with people’s status in society. That is to say, manual labor who holds lower social position often work outdoors; therefore, their skin gets tanned because of sunlight exposure. In contrast, ones at higher social class such as doctors or professors have a whiter and brighter skin tone due to working indoors. This partly attributes to people’s preference to a fair skin pigment which can be easily obtained by cosmetics.
However, beauty products can have adverse effects on users’ health together with the whole society. On the one side, due to the huge profit that the cosmetics industry offers, some low-quality whitening creams from the black market can be widely peddled from small shops to beauty centers. When consuming these unknown-source products which includes some prescription-strength ingredients namely steroid or toxin, purchasers may get skin allergy, have severe itchy rashes or even suffer from skin cancer. On the other side, the trend for a white complexion likely fuel the discrimination based on skin color in the world. Specifically, in some areas, dark-skinned people would certainly have more difficulty in finding jobs or getting married than bright-skinned ones. In addition, people from some regions are gradually losing their identity via changing their innate skin hue to fit in the crowd. For instance, the majority of Nigerian women who naturally own a dark complexion are potential consumers of skin-lightening products.
In conclusion, the high consumption of fairness creams may stem from different aspects but its detrimental impacts on buyers’ health and our society are worth concerning. Therefore, some steps should be taken to solve these drawbacks.