Produit

Mauritanians like to dress up fancy. Women put on make up in two stages: produit and maquillage. The latter is your traditional foundation (several shades too light), eyeshadow (in scary colors), lipstick (dark red or even black), etc. The former is a scary phenomenon that I had hoped was confined to Mauritania - till today. But more of that later...

"Produit" (said "prahdu-ee", for you non-french-pronouncers) refers to a variety of skin creams that are supposed to lighten skin. They usually come in bottles featuring photos of very blond, very white, very happy ladies. Women here use them copiously. This is frightening on two levels: first because all of these products actually contain bleach - or even acid, I've heard - and are really bad for skin (you see some scary looking skin damage from overuse); secondly just in principle. Why do all these beautiful dark-skinned women want to be white?

The reason is fairly obvious to anybody living here - black skin is "bad" (as people will tell you without a second thought), and most of the darker people here are descended from former slaves. The whiter Arabic sorts, on the other hand, have always been the people in charge. Even now all the rich and influential people are most likely to be white moors. So I suppose the desire to have lighter skin is explicable, if really sad.

I've come to accept that these sorts of attitudes are normal in Mauritania. After all, we're kind of the trailer park of the world, here. We're weird, we're a bit "bedui" ("sauvage" in French, "hicks" in English), and no one here is politically correct. But I was shocked today to see an advertisement for the same sort of thing on Arabic satellite TV. It wasn't quite as blatent (there was lots of stuff about "clarifying" and "purifying" skin) but it's the same thing. The commercial began with a really pretty, dark girl announcing, "I realized that the only thing between me and my dream job was my skin." She then applies Fair and Lovely, and magically becomes several shades lighter, after which she becomes a TV reporter and gets asked out by a cute guy. I'm really amazed that they can get away with that sort of thing in first world countries. It's scary.

In other Arabic commercial news, the prize for the worst product name and promotional campaign goes to: POCARI SWEAT ION REPLACEMENT DRINK, which comes in an ugly blue can and should be used when water just isn't enough.