This project, "Race, Immigration, and the Public Understanding of Science: The Case of Skin Bleaching" examines how the language of scientific information (such as product labeling) or public health messaging (such as warnings from public health departments), are understood and incorporated by diverse immigrant communities living in the United States. We combined both archival research and qualitative methods. We interviewed 72 immigrant women and men living in the United States who use skin bleaching/lightening products in order to better understand how product messages circulate globally, whether communities receive existing warnings about potentially harmful chemicals in products, where people purchase products, how they read and understood labels, where they received their scientific information, and who they trusted for information. 

Skin bleaching can be a mentally and physically harmful practice linked with histories of colonialism and racial discrimination. It can expose product users to chemicals linked with health harm. Yet, the practice persists. Participants in our study immigrated to the US from over 25 countries including Thailand, Mexico, the Ivory Coast, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Philippines, India, and Jamaica, and interviews were conducted in several languages including Thai, Spanish, Korean, English, and French. We also conducted archival research in corporate archives to analyze how global corporations, which sell many skin lightening products under different product types (lotions, soaps, washes, toners, etc..), and under different brand names, market globally to diverse communities.  Archival research demonstrated longstanding efforts to maintain a skin bleaching market over decades, even when national policies, racial justice movements, or political activism threatened to reduce sales. Global corporations pivoted messaging away from “skin lightening” towards language such as “evening” or “toning” while maintaining visual cues in advertising and active skin lightening chemical ingredients. Our interviewees used a wide range and diversity of products, often from a young age to not only lighten skin on faces but on underarms, behind knees, and on children. They also used products to even skin after pregnancy, lighten dark spots, and reduce acne scars. Beauty messages about pregnancy, aging, and the privileges that accrue to people with lighter skin were common, but most participants did not always connect the practice to racism or colorism, but to general beauty preferences. Racialized beauty practices have become invisible but operate as a norm for many consumers. In addition, scientific and public health warnings rarely, if ever, reached study participants who used these products. Some participants used products that have been publicly flagged by California and New York public health departments, but they had not seen any warnings, nor looked for them. Rather, participants tended to trust proximate sources such as family and friends, but most often they trusted themselves and their own research. Participants conducted "self-research" via online reviewer sites, social media influencer videos, and by trying and abandoning products if these caused an immediate reaction or were not effective for the purposes they were purchased. Participants typically did not consider long term health consequences. Participants were often unaware of illegal and toxic chemicals such as mercury that could be in products and were often unclear on which active ingredients were in their in skin-lightening products, such as steroids or hydroquinone, that have also been linked with longer term health harm. While mercury is a tightly regulated and often illegal substance in beauty products, mercury-based products remain widely available in a host of online markets and in-person stores and swap meets. Self-research raises critical questions for consumers, and is typically unreliable, since the United States has largescale regulatory gaps for personal care products, including beauty products, with labels often not reflecting product content. In addition, on-line markets continue to sell many products that have been found to be illegal or toxic. The skin bleaching market, a growing $15 billion market, provides insights into shifts that could be made to better connect public health warnings and scientific messaging with diverse immigrant communities living in the United States, while messaging should also contend with the reach of the global beauty industry that aims to maintain this market, including recognition of how online consumer reviews and social media are widely relied on by consumers. 

Last Modified: 08/12/2024
Modified by: Bhavna Shamasunder