When I was growing up, every two years or so, my family would spend the summer in India, from where my parents immigrated to the United States. For many hours on those long, hot days, when our cousins were at school or work, my bookish siblings and I read whatever we could find around the house that was printed in English: musty paperbacks of The Famous Five and The Hardy Boys, women’s magazines like Femina, and every page of any English-language newspaper – including the matrimonial ads. We were children raised in the United States, so we cackled over the frequent use of the word “homely” to describe women who were purportedly good at domestic labor and at ads that described suitors as having “no vices.” However, among the bewildering array of “biodata” listed in these ads were descriptors of skin tone: “very fair,” “fair” or “wheatish” (never “toffee,” “chestnut,” or “dark”). The Matrimonial section is where I first encountered the idea of skin color as social capital. My understanding of the societal conflation of light skin tone with beauty was reinforced in the ubiquitous ads (in magazines, on television and billboards) for Fair & Lovely, a skin-lightening cream. These ads featured the biggest Bollywood stars who, in the “after” images, had skin so light it would meet Victorian beauty ideals.
I recalled these experiences as I read Collen Campbell’s recently published article, which uses, as a case study, the under-regulation of skin-lightening creams to illustrate the need for intersectionality analyses in U.S. food and drug law. Safety concerns about cosmetics have been trivialized in food and drug law because of its “characterization as a superficial beautifying agent and its feminization, since women are its primary consumers.” Beauty products whose primary consumers are women of color are even more neglected, leaving these consumers more vulnerable to toxic exposures and compounding existing health disparities.
The Article begins with an explanation for how we got here, drawing on the existing feminist and intersectional critiques of food and drug law. As Professor Campbell states, “An intersectional lens uncovers the various underlying forces that produce a disparate health impact for women of color: systemic racism in health, racially targeted marketing, and hegemonic beauty norms shaped by race and skin color constructs.” The Article places in context the lax regulation of cosmetics marketed to women of color – and Black women in particular – by describing how these groups have disproportionately borne the risks of novel reproductive technologies, such as intrauterine devices like the Dalkon Shield and injectable contraceptives like Norplant.
The Article includes a nuanced and valuable discussion of motivations for skin lightening. Professor Campbell first defines systemic colorism as “[a]n idealization of phenotypic proximity to Whiteness and the social valuation of those features.” She explains that although colorism and racism are “systems of discrimination [that] emanate from specific sociocultural, institutional, and historical processes, including the institutions of slavery and colonialism,” they are distinct. Here, Professor Campbell makes an important contribution to public health discourses on the risks of skin lightening by pointing to the overemphasis on individualized interventions—issuing consumer warnings about skin-lightening products, “educating” women that dark skin is beautiful—while neglecting structural forces such as “systemic racism and colorism, hegemonic beauty norms, transnational capitalism, and racial marketing.”
Troublingly, Professor Campbell notes, individualizing the public health problem of skin lightening “reproduce[s] problematic stereotypes that invariably pathologize women.” It also erases the perspectives of women of color who may, in the context of systemic colorism, make rational choices to lighten their skin in order to acquire social capital or even escape harm.
In the end, Professor Campbell takes a characteristically nuanced position, calling for more regulatory attention to toxic chemicals in skin-lightening products, but not for a general ban on skin-lightening products. She links the issue of “greater regulatory attention to feminized products” to the perennial challenges women face in exercising their bodily autonomy. Professor Campbell acknowledges that some readers may still perceive her proposal as paternalistic but justifies it as an acceptable response to the public health threat of toxic exposure to cosmetics and their contribution to health disparities.
I encourage health law scholars to read this article in part because its case study focuses on a topic that, not so long ago, might have been considered so marginal as to be unsuitable for scholarly inquiry. And this precisely illustrates Professor Campbell’s point: The need to mainstream intersectionality analyses in food and drug law—and health law generally—in order to identify the structural forces shaping health inequities and the scale of interventions needed to eliminate them.
