One of the famous Uganda feminists, as well as the executive director of UNAIDS, ‘Winnie Byanyima’, has urged Ugandans women to stop using bleach on their skin or bodies and stated that the act is a risk to their health.
Skin bleaching is something that is a practice of using chemical substances so that they can fair their skin and lighten their skin, providing an even skin color by reducing the melanin concentration in the skin.
This all happened in NBS Chat Room, in which Byanyima warned that those applying bleach or any product in which some particles of bleach are involved risk getting cancer. She further stated that some of the products contain poisonous chemicals that can cause cancer.
“Every doctor will tell that bleaching is injurious for your health. You will get sick. So, please stop using bleach on your skin,” she said.
Byanyima highlighted that there needs to be a law that protects Ugandans against the use of harmful bleaching content in women’s products.
She further appealed to all women of Uganda and the world that they should feel confident and beautiful in their natural colors, saying body bleaching is an abhorrent practice.
“Dark-skinned people are trying to get whiter, bleaching their hairs from dark to white… All this is a remain of the slave trade where we were not human beings, where we were traded,”
Byanyima thus called for management intervention to protect Ugandan women against harmful bleaching products.
She again appealed and stated, “I think we lack guidance, and we need some advice from health leaders about what is acceptable. I told them that some have a little bit that will not be going to damage your body and that some will damage it. There is room for the management to regulate this.”