Walk into any cosmetic store across Pakistan you would be greeted with shelves filled with colorful promises of “instant glow”, “fairness in seven days”.

Behind these alluring promises, glossy packaging, fronted by beautiful and flawless skin models, lies a harsh reality: Pakistan’s booming and multibillion-rupee beauty industry is exploiting our deep-rooted cultural obsession with fairer skin. Inherited from the legacy of our colonial era and earlier social hierarchies, this cultural fixation has cemented a widespread belief equating fairer skin to social superiority and wrongly positioning it as a source of confidence. Beyond the empty promises, the deception continues as the shiny packaging and catchy slogans mask the severe human health risk.

The majority of the most popular skin whitening creams contains dangerously high level of mercury – a toxic substance banned in cosmetics under international law, for it causes irreversible damage to the kidney, nervous system, and skin.

Several Pakistani-made beauty creams are being pulled from shelves in multiple countries, after international regulatory bodies and watchdog organizations found and highlighted severe and dangerous contamination of mercury in them. In 2022, the Bangladesh Standards and Testing Institution (BSTI) banned 14 Pakistani beauty cream brands after their laboratory tests revealed mercury levels thousands of times higher than the global safety limit of 1 part per million (ppm). Similarly, the Food and Drug........

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