Skin Whitening

My. Fair. Beauty. Fair skin is sexy. A lady with fair fine skin is regarded as a fair beauty.

For centuries, men have equated fair skin on ladies with beauty. Even today, although tan skin is appreciated in the west, most cultures prize fair skin. Men love fair beauties. Not the sickly white, corpse-like complexion, but fair, translucent and radiant with a healthy rosy flush.

With sun exposure, even wearing an SPF 50 sunblock will not prevent your skin from darkening. That fair, white complexion is hard to attain and just as hard to maintain.

In the past, women would stay out of the sun as far as possible in order to prevent their skin from darkening. If they had to go out in the sun, they would carry parasols to protect themselves from the sun’s skin-darkening rays.

Whitening home remedies have been in existence for as long as fair skin has been in vogue. In the kitchen, a woman might mix egg white with lemon juice to use as a facial mask to lighten the skin.

Licorice root contains substances that fade away the pigmentation in the skin and hence is used in many skin lightening products. Hydroquinone is another potent skin lightening ingredient used in skin whitening treats. It disrupts the production of melanin and hence prevents skin from darkening. Arbutin is another skin lightening ingredient that works by inhibiting the production of melanin.

Many of the skin whitening products contain plant extracts to give you fairer skin. Mulberry, white mulberry and paper mulberry contain arbutin which makes skin fairer by preventing your skin from darkening. Elizabeth Arden’s Prevage White Concentrate Brightening Serum has Soy Ferulate-C.

Most whitening skincare products make skin fairer by sloughing off the darkened surface of the epidermis. Alpha hydroxy acids like lactic acid and glycolic acid remove hyperpigmented skin cells and boost cell turnover, hence making skin fairer. Garnier light night overnight whitening peeling cream uses AHAs to peel the skin and slow down melanin production.

Then there are those that prevent skin from darkening by inhibiting melanin production. Melanin is the pigment that gives skin its color. More melanin is produced when the skin is exposed to sunlight. Vitamin C, Kojic acid, Azelaic acid, Arbutin and Hydroquinone are substances often used in skin whitening products to lighten your skin through the inhibition of melanin production. Biotherm white detox targets RAB27 which would otherwise support the melanin that would cause dark spots.

Typically, whitening skincare products treat the epidermis at most. Recently, Lancome has come up with a range that treats the dermis as well as the epidermis. Since UV rays penetrate the dermis as well as the epidermis and causes inflammatory messengers to stimulate melanocytes to produce melanin which causes skin to darken, Lancome’s blanc expert GN-White generating new whiteness spot eraser targets these inflammatory messengers on the epidermis and dermis to prevent the darkening of the skin.

This is done through the use of sphinganine and mint to neutralize those signals so that melanocytes aren’t stimulated to make melanin.

By: Janice Tham