Why Killer T must not bleach

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Killer T, if you are bleaching your face in order to look lighter, please don’t. Take my advice. First of all, it is harmful and unhealthy. Secondly, it does not enhance your popularity as the girls will keep coming since they are already attracted to you by the force of your music. I give you this advice so that you can nip in the bud problems which might affect you in future.

Killer T, if you are bleaching your face in order to look lighter, please don’t. Take my advice. First of all, it is harmful and unhealthy. Secondly, it does not enhance your popularity as the girls will keep coming since they are already attracted to you by the force of your music. I give you this advice so that you can nip in the bud problems which might affect you in future.

in the groove with Fred Zindi

Killer T

The reason why I have this receding hairline on me is not because of my age but because as a young man, I did not have someone to advise me that perming my hair in order to look “fashionable and good” and putting so many dangerous chemicals on it would result in permanent hair loss. I only realised it when it was too late to recover. So, young man, take this advice seriously. Consider yourself lucky to have elders like me watching over you and giving you the right advice. Last year, in your natural brown skin, you looked darker than you are now. What has happened?

A somewhat disturbing thing in Zimbabwe today is the increasingly widespread practice of skin bleaching, as we are bombarded with lightening celebrities and cheap creams on the shelves. First it was the Congolese musicians who came to this country with their bleached light skin bodies as they danced to rhumba grooves. We copied everything wholesale.

For clarification, we are not talking about using a bit of Ambi on the neck, underarms or other dark areas here and there, but more about the kind of fervent whole body bleaching that many have adopted to change one’s complexion entirely. How common is the practice?

This subject is a controversial one and this article could delve into colonialism, shadism, colourism and a variety of “isms” as awkward questions about identity and race are raised, but the motive here is not to examine why we as a society even want to lighten our skin in the first place but instead, to show how dangerous this practice is. A lot of us aspire to look white because we mistakenly think that since most white people have superior economic advantages over us due to historical reasons, they are a superior race.

It is now known that chemical bleaching can lead to serious skin and health conditions which include: thinning of skin, uneven colour loss, a blotchy appearance, redness and intense irritation, skin cancer, acne, osteoporosis, neurological and kidney damage due to high level of mercury used in the creams, psychiatric disorders, asthma, liver damage and severe birth defects in children born to mothers who abuse certain chemicals.

One of the most public proponents of bleaching is Jamaican singing star Vybz Kartel (real name, Adidja Palmer), who is currently serving a jail term for the murder of a music promoter in Kingston as well as for illegal possession of a firearm and some drug-related offences. In 2011, he launched a range of men’s cosmetics which included a variety of “skin lightening” creams. He is idolised by many Zimbabwean youth, especially in the ghetto and more urban areas. The singer’s complexion has dramatically lightened in recent years and he even sings about his bleaching: Look Pon Me which contains the lines: “Di girl dem love off mi brown cute face, di girl dem love off mi bleach-out face.”

Jamaicans, though, are waking up to the issue and health officials are running warnings on local radio stations, putting up posters in schools, holding talks and handing out literature about the dangers of bleaching one’s skin.

Keep in mind that even though a cream is sold over the counter, it is not necessarily safe. Hydroquinone, a common ingredient of many of the creams used, for example, has long been linked to a disfiguring condition called ochronosis that causes a splotchy darkening of the skin and may even leave a web of stretch marks across the user’s face.

Another singer who bleached his skin, although he never admitted it, was the late “King of Pop”, Michael Jackson.

Starting in the mid-1980s, it became clear that Jackson’s appearance was changing dramatically. The shape of his face, particularly his nose, triggered widespread speculation of extensive cosmetic surgery. His skin tone became much lighter. Although Jackson, a black man, was diagnosed with the skin disorder vitiligo, which results in white patches on the skin, and said that he had not purposely bleached his skin but had used makeup to even out his skin tone, it was also widely suggested that his lighter skin tone was partly due to skin bleaching.

By the mid-90s when Jackson released his album History (1995), it was more than obvious even to his most dedicated fans that the man of Thriller (1982) looked nothing like the man who had recently married Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. By this time, Jackson was milky white; a skin-colour transition that started almost a decade earlier was more or less complete. So what happened?

When the controversy about his changing skin colour hit its zenith, Jackson spoke openly about his vitiligo for the first time in an interview he gave to Oprah Winfrey in 1993. He said among other things:

“It is something I cannot help. When people make up stories that I don’t want to be who I am, it hurts me. It’s a problem for me. I can’t control it. But what about all the millions of people who sit in the sun to become darker, to become other than what they are. Nobody says nothing about that.”

Conspiracy theorists propose that there was much more to it than this. That in fact Jackson had no such disease and that he, instead, systematically bleached his skin using Benoquin cream and other medical cocktails in his quest to look like a white person.

The obvious and extensive cosmetic surgeries he had on his eyebrows, eyelashes, lip, and nose only served to enforce the theory that he was simply purposefully tweaking his appearance even more by bleaching his skin.

Much later, in June of 2009 after his death, tubes of Benoquin and hydroquinone were found in Jackson’s home. Besides giving him a white complexion, this also results in being prone to sun burns, which is why in later years he often kept himself nearly completely covered when outside in the sun. In the end, only Jackson knew his true motivation for ultimately choosing to bleach his skin, whether as a treatment for his vitiligo to even out his skin colour as reported, or as the conspiracy theorists claim, to further change his appearance to more of a Caucasian look, though one would think the latter would be an odd move for the co-author of the line: It don’t matter if you’re black or white. In my view, he should have followed James Brown, his mentor’s advice, which was, I am Black and Proud.

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