We think it’s just for lightening our skin but few chemicals are more useful than hydroquinone. It turns silver dark so film can be developed. It keeps acrylic paints smooth. It is used in making rubber tires and weed killers. And it is the most popular prescription medication for lightening African-American skin. But imagine what it’s doing do your skin.

Hydroquinone really does lighten skin. Under the very best circumstances, hydroquinone produces a “temporary” lightening of the skin by deactivating an enzyme that enables the melanocytes, or pigment-producing cells, of your skin to make dark pigments. It can remove freckles, age spots, and melasma, the areas of especially dark pigmentation that can occur on African-American skin.

Brown and black skins, however, tend to have a “memory.” When darker skins are injured, the injury tends to be permanent. And hydroquinone makes African-American skin especially susceptible to injury by sunlight.

When skin treated with hydroquinone is exposed to excessive sun, the melanocytes, already under stress by the chemical’s interference with their enzymes, can be permanently injured. They form permanent black spots on the skin exposed to the sun. The result is a new beauty issue that is even more difficult than the condition the drug is designed to treat.

As awful as this result can be, misinformation can make it worse. Many users of hydroquinone creams are erroneously informed that they contain sunblock. They typically do not. The user goes out into the sun thinking she or he is protected, when actually they are permanently damaging their skin.

Hydroquinone? I don’t think so.

Dedicated to Your Beauty,

Juliette Samuel,

Esthetician/Publisher

NYRAJU Skin Care

http://blog.nyrajuskincare.com/2010/03/19/choosing-natural-skin-lighteners-for-black-skin-care-over-mainstream-products/