Walk through any market in Cameroon, cross into Nigeria, step onto a street corner in Accra or Lagos, and you will notice something that nobody announces, but everybody knows. The creams are everywhere. In handbags, on bathroom shelves, in the stalls of open-air markets sold alongside food and soap. It is genuinely difficult, in communities across Central and West Africa, to find a woman or a man who has not at some point reached for a bleaching cream, not out of self-hatred in any simple sense, but out of a completely rational response to a world that has spent generations telling them that lighter skin is more attractive, more professional, more marriageable, more worthy. You can watch this ideology play out on a Tuesday afternoon in Nollywood films, in Ghanaian television dramas, in the advertisements running between the programs. It is not hidden. It is the water people swim in.This article argues that what is visible on those bathroom shelves is not a personal grooming habit. It is the endpoint of a system. Beauty standards across every inhabited continent, originally rooted in local culture, spiritual tradition, and social meaning, were captured by colonial powers, commercial industries, and media systems, stripped of that meaning, and rebuilt as instruments of insecurity designed to drive consumption, enforce hierarchy, and produce measurable psychological harm. The mechanism cuts across sociology, anthropology, and psychology simultaneously. This review holds it through a public health lens, because that is where the human cost becomes impossible to ignore.In a study of 19,624 university students across 26 countries, overall 12-month skin lightener use was 24.5 percent, rising to over 77 percent in some Nigerian populations and 83.8 percent in Thailand (Peltzer, Pengpid, and James, 2015). Body dysmorphic disorder affects an estimated two percent of the global population, with high rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts documented in prospective research (Phillips and Menard, 2006). Anorexia nervosa carries the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric diagnosis. Between 40 and 50 percent of children aged six to twelve in surveyed populations already report dissatisfaction with their body shape and size (Akliman, Avci, and Avci, 2023). The Brazilian Butt Lift carries the highest fatality rate of any elective cosmetic surgery (Rapkiewicz et al., 2018).These are not coincidences. They are outcomes of a system built to produce them. This review synthesizes the evidence across regions, traces the repeating pattern, and makes the case that the global mental health crisis emerging from distorted body image is not a personal failing of individuals. It is the predictable product of industries that profit from self-doubt, operating at a global scale, with full knowledge of the harm they cause.
Godswill Suh Che (Sun,) studied this question.