This meticulously researched book delivers on its enticing title to go ‘beneath the surface’ of skin lightening in South Africa, offering a compelling multilayered history that details the discourses, practices, and industries that enabled and continue to support preferences for and resistance against skin lighteners. There are many controversies that swirl around their use, raising ‘knotty political and conceptual issues of self-expression versus social control, informed choice versus false consciousness, and politics versus aesthetics’ (3). By insisting on analyzing skin lightening through excavating its layered history, Thomas's approach refutes superficial interpretations focused on pathology or irrelevance by productively centering nuance and ambiguity. The book aptly considers the importance of both personal desires and structural transformations that inform the affective politics of skin lightening.
Though Thomas centers South Africa in her analysis, she does so through a ‘connective comparison’ framework that ‘entails attending to developments in multiple places, and then determining when those developments are linked, and when they diverge’ (12). By acknowledging transnational ties, this instructive approach traces the complex processes that facilitated the popularity of skin lighteners in South Africa. Thomas justifies her selection of South Africa as her primary research site by noting its four-tiered racial hierarchy, capitalist economy, and legacies of colonialism, apartheid, and segregation, which produced a specific set of political stakes concerning skin tone that led to the rise and eventual ban of skin lighteners. Thomas argues that skin lighteners are a ‘technology of visibility’ that allows individuals to garner attention and also engenders and challenges hierarchies of race, class, and gender. She draws from a variety of source materials — including archeological evidence, anthropological observations, travel diaries, missionary records, regulatory policies, medical studies, social movement archives, marketing reports, magazines, and oral histories — to provide a multifaceted analysis.
Chapter One examines precolonial and colonial practices surrounding lighter skin. A preference for lighter skin tones predated European colonialism among some ethnolinguistic groups in Southern Africa, due to rituals that associated bright and shiny skin with purity and feminine beauty through the use of white clay and red ochre, amongst other ingredients. Meanwhile, elites in early modern Europe prized pale skin as a sign of status and youthfulness, leading to the rise of cosmetic use to lighten the skin. The increased consumption of these products dovetailed with European imperialism, slavery, and colonialism, in which skin-tone-based racial hierarchies that privileged light skin and denigrated dark skin proliferated.
Chapters Two, Three, and Four consider the growing market for skin lightening that specifically targeted Black African (and Coloured) people. Chapter Two analyzes the respectability politics that emerged starting in the 1930s around the new ‘Black modern girl’ look, which included valorizing lighter skin, fostering rich debates about whether these images constituted racial pride or shame. Chapter Three takes a close look at the manufacturing of skin lighteners in South Africa in the 1930s and 1940s, during which the white consumer market fell and the Coloured and Black clientele steadily grew. Chapter Four tackles the height of the South African skin lightening boom in the late 1940s until the mid-1970s, during which the heavy promotion of skin lightening agents through beauty queens and other glamorous celebrities intensified their popularity. This period coincided with the deepening of apartheid rule to further disenfranchise Black South Africans, such that skin tone increasingly mattered for life chances and social mobility. Meanwhile, many Black South Africans had increasing access to material resources that augmented their purchasing power to afford such commodities.
Chapters Five and Six examine intersecting political and medical opposition to skin lighteners. Chapter Five looks into debates about the active ingredients used in these products and their ill health effects as well as a growing political consciousness around valuing Black beauty, including dark complexions. Chapter Six explores how growing medical concerns and antiracist protests collided to spur a decline in their use. By 1990, South Africa was the first country to pass regulations that banned the manufacturing, distribution, and advertising of skin lighteners. The Conclusion delves into their contemporary significance within and beyond South Africa, including the role of social media, new ingredients, and ongoing health debates. Each chapter logically builds on the preceding one to provide a comprehensive account and cohesive argument.
Among the many strengths of the book is its transnational and diasporic approach. It includes empirical evidence from East Africa, the United States, and Europe to contextualize the topic and the place of South Africa. For example, at various points Thomas details the transatlantic circulation of products and media between South Africans and African Americans in ways that recalibrate conventional understandings of racial politics and the global flow of goods and ideologies. She also juxtaposes tanning and lightening to offer several thought-provoking points about race, class, and leisure. While many of the key arguments are relevant beyond South Africa, a stronger explanation could be offered about whether these central claims should be applied beyond this context, given the country's specific racialized history of colonialism and apartheid.
This is an impressive book that will surely be a classic for scholars interested in aesthetics, beauty politics, and gender. It is an especially welcome addition to the literature as it centers on African history from a transnational perspective. It also has much to offer those with specialization in the history of science, medicine, and technology, as the book provides insights about the role of shifting advances in photography, developments in the medical field, and debates about regulatory policies. This text would be appropriate for teaching undergraduate and graduate students interested in gender, embodiment, and politics. On the whole, this book is cogently argued and deeply engaging. Photographs, including several in color, further enliven the analysis. Beneath the Surface does not offer facile answers as to the popularity and contestation of skin lighteners, but is rather focused on the subtle contradictions and distinctions that contributed to these contested products and practices.
