This paper describes the world wide growth in sales of skin-lightening products, predominantly but not entirely to women, and attempts to contextualize it in terms of globalization. Evidence of this growth will be presented from Nairobi, Manila, Bangkok, Delhi, Lahore and London. Marketing is done implicitly through choice of photographic models but often quite explicitly in the text of adverts and package labelling. Attempts at skin-lightening are either futile or dangerous. There is probably no medically safe way to lighten skin colour and many of the ingredients used in the past are now banned in the EU and by authorities elsewhere. The commercial centre of such cosmetics appears to be France (Mire, 2005), though since they avoid the banned chemicals it is debatable whether they are selling anything effective. The manufacturing centre for more harmful creams and lotions seems to be the Indian sub-continent (Caplan, 2001) from where they find their way, illegally, to Britain where there is a ready market to some young British people of Caribbean and South Asian descent. This developing phenomenon is contextualised theoretically and historically in various ways: pre or non-racial valorisation of light skin colour in Europe and Asia (Dumont, 1972; Mason, 1970, Hall, 1995); the apparent contradiction between the self-realisation inherent in the historical struggles of black liberation (Essien-Udom, 1962) and anti-colonialism and the re-emergence of a preference for lighter colour (hooks, 1995; Fanon, 1952); the globalisation of a white European aesthetic (Said, 1978); attempts in the UK to foster positive images of non-Europeans in school materials (Brown, 2001) the role of multinational pharmaceutical companies (Piess, 1998). The research is based upon examining products available and marketed in various ways in Kenya, South East Asia and the UK, content analysis of TV and magazine adverts and packaging materials, and a variety of written sources – from magazines aimed at women, to novels, to formal research texts (Kahurananga, 2006; Maugham, 1921; Souljah, 1996). The paper suggests that this seemingly growing valorisation of European ‘racial whiteness’ must have a corrosive effect upon the self-image of young Europeans with heritages elsewhere, if indeed the same processes are at work in, for instance, the Netherlands and France. It therefore presents educators with renewed challenges.

Textual analysis (novels, magazines, advertising materials). Interviews.

The aesthetic value of appearing lighter skinned is spreading, sometimes in surprising places. Whatever its varying and complex historical roots it is increasingly driven by globalised cosmetics companies and can only have negative effects on young people with roots outside Europe growing up within it.