Another Product You Don't Need
One of my distributors sent me a list of new products yesterday and one of them caught my attention - for all the wrong reasons.
The writing in the picture is pretty small, so if you haven't figure it out from the name, I'll let you know what it says "Intimate Area Lightening Gel - improves the look of discoloured areas - anal, vaginal, bikini area, nipple, dark underarms - FOR WOMEN'.
I'm sure you are way ahead of me regarding what I'm going to say about this but I'm going to say it anyway. Before I do however, I will preface it by saying that I am in full support of every person's right to do whatever they want with their body. The way you want your body to look is your business. If you honestly would prefer that parts of your body appear lighter than they currently are, fill your boots.
Now, having said that, I absolutely hate stuff like this. It's the worst aspect of my industry - this technique of creating some supposed standard of what people are supposed to look like (one that, conveniently, almost no one meets naturally) and then selling them a product so they can achieve it. If you weren't certain about this, I will make it crystal clear for you - human skin is NEVER free of marks, blemishes, and variations in color. Why do we expect that everyone (well maybe not everyone, maybe just women) have perfectly smooth, consistently colored, baby soft skin? Skin has a purpose - it's to protect our insides. In serving that purpose, it's subjected to a lot of abuse and wear and tear. That shows on our bodies. And that's really okay. Some of those marks and variations in color aren't even from age and abuse anyway, even brand new babies have them! That's how human skin is - we shouldn't expect people to look a way that's not normal for humans.
Then there is the thinly veiled racism here. Again, human skin comes in lots of colors and shades. And the skin on certain parts of our bodies is often darker than other places. Who decided that lighter is better? The idea that lighter is better conforms to the hierarchy in our culture of who has the most privilege. The relation of skin lightening, even if it's marketed solely for genitals, to racism in our culture is not coincidental. There is a message here and it's pretty scary if you really think about it.
There is also a whole other layer of messed up racist and sexist messages in the name 'pink taco' that I'm not even going to get into.
I also have a lot of concerns about putting anything that lightens skin directly on or in the vulva but I haven't thoroughly researched that so I'm not going to get into that here.
Lastly, there's one more aspect that shocked even me as I looked into this today. What would you expect to pay for this 1 ounce bottle of vulva bleach? $14? $20? Yes, that's what I thought. Nope, the regular retail price of this is $66 CAD. Yep, you read that right! $66 for one ounce of cream that makes your skin a little lighter. A great value, I'm sure.
For $66 you could buy a pretty decent quality vibrator that would last you a lot longer than the bleach in that bottle and probably make your vulva much, much happier.