Source: Times Live                                                                                                                                                                                                                Skin lightening is about fashion, not inferiority -- and it is an issue ripe with hypocrisy.

         Toning. Lightening. Brightening. Whitening. The marketing slogans promoting skin enhancement in Africa might be varied, but the underlying effects are pretty much identical.

Although I do not use skin-lightening products, I live in Nigeria, where millions of women do. On offer are a myriad products designed to make dark skin lighter: kojic acid soaps, fade creams, hydroquinone creams, whitening shower gels made from goat's milk and, for the more determined, skin lightening injections.

So when popular Kenyan model and socialite Vera Sidika publicly admitted last month to spending tons of money bleaching her skin, she added fuel to an already smoking-hot fire. Just one admission was enough to reignite the fierce debate about Africans' perception of beauty.

Sidika said she was proud of the way she looked and thought African societies were hypocritical about the issue.

Her honesty roused the ire of social media users across the continent.

Passions inevitably run high among Africans whenever someone brings racial issues into play.

On the topic of skin whitening, emotionally charged slogans such as "black is beautiful" are often employed in an attempt to make women like Sidika feel as if they are somehow betraying their race.

Such women are accused of having inferiority complexes in relation to white people.

In Nigeria - where 77% of women use skin-lightening products, according to the World Health Organisation - the mainstream African commentariat, which is mostly male, projects a strong bias against the practice.

I am a dark-skinned Nigerian woman, but I feel that, although there are valid health concerns about the side effects of skin-lightening products, it should remain an individual's prerogative to be who or what they want to be.

Yes, black is beautiful, but so are white, brown, yellow and the many shades in between.

When white people use tanning lotions, solariums and other methods to darken their skin, it is treated as par for the course and other white people do not feel the need to remind them that "white is beautiful".

In fact, such a statement would likely be regarded as racist by members of other races.

Yes, I understand that there was a specific historical context in the US and elsewhere that, at the time, necessitated the use of the "black is beautiful" slogan in order to boost black people's sense of self-worth and identity, but this is 2014 and we should have got beyond that by now.

Or are self-affirming slogans going to be needed by black people forever?

People's desire to have a particular skin tone, be it darker or lighter, stems from them wanting to be more attractive. And more often than not, in the case of an individual who has undergone skin lightening here in Africa, it works.

The critics might be unwilling to concede this publicly, but the harsh truth is that lighter-skinned girls in Africa do get more attention and are more appreciated than darker-skinned women.

It is not unusual to hear Nigerian men say things such as "Oh, I met this beautiful girl the other day. She had a great body and she was fair in complexion."

But these same men would hypocritically voice outrage if a Nigerian woman, especially one in the public eye, openly admitted to bleaching her skin. If skin tone didn't matter at all to Nigerian men, skin-lightening creams and soaps wouldn't be flying off the shelves here.

In Nigerian music videos, too, there is a glaring preference for lighter-skinned females. The niggling suspicion remains that my society is more self-delusional about questions of identity and its perception of beauty than it cares to admit.

Physical attraction is instinctive and lighter-skinned women are bound to attract more attention from men in a dark-skinned society such as Nigeria - just like darker-skinned people do in predominantly white societies.

Such interest does not have to be due to any sort of complex and is often simply mere curiosity about difference.

Skin lightening should not be automatically regarded as an individual's outright rejection of their race. If a woman believes that lightening her skin will make her prettier or more confident, society should let her be and not impose itself as judge and jury of her concept of beauty.

It is high time Africans stopped being hysterical and overly defensive about issues of their self-worth and identity.