{"id":5626,"date":"2011-04-14T15:26:55","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T19:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=5626"},"modified":"2011-04-14T15:26:55","modified_gmt":"2011-04-14T19:26:55","slug":"skin-bleaching-a-growing-problem-in-jamaica-slums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=5626","title":{"rendered":"Skin Bleaching A Growing Problem In Jamaica Slums"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>KINGSTON, Jamaica &#8212; <strong>Mikeisha Simpson<\/strong> covers her body in greasy white cream and bundles up in a track suit to avoid the fierce sun of her native Jamaica, but she&#8217;s not worried about skin cancer.<\/p>\n<p>The 23-year-old resident of a Kingston ghetto hopes to transform her dark complexion to a cafe-au-lait-color common among Jamaica&#8217;s elite and favored by many men in her neighborhood. She believes a fairer skin could be her ticket to a better life. So she spends her meager savings on cheap black-market concoctions that promise to lighten her pigment.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Simpson<\/strong> and her friends ultimately shrug off public health campaigns and reggae hits blasting the reckless practice.<\/p>\n<p>Most Jamaican bleachers use over-the-counter creams, many of them knockoffs imported from West Africa.<\/p>\n<p>In Japan, the European Union, and Australia, hydroquinone has been removed from over-the-counter skin products and substituted with other chemicals due to concerns about health risks.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Pictured: In this photo taken Feb. 15, 2011, a woman applies skin lightening cream to her legs as she sits on a curb in downtown Kingston, Jamaica. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>KINGSTON, Jamaica &#8212; Mikeisha Simpson covers her body in greasy white cream and bundles up in a track suit to avoid the fierce sun of her native Jamaica, but she&#8217;s not worried about skin cancer. The 23-year-old resident of a Kingston ghetto hopes to transform her dark complexion to a cafe-au-lait-color common among Jamaica&#8217;s elite [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5626\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}