Susan Anderson, age 52, sits in the corner of a sunlit waiting room at a dermatology clinic in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja. Dark patches of skin, dotted with brighter pigments, surround her eyes and cover her cheeks.
“It used to be much worse,” she says, scrolling through pictures of her face on her phone, taken more than a year ago, when the blotches were raw and parts of her skin seared pink. Doctors who first saw her said it looked as if she had first-degree burns.
The first time Anderson used a skin whitening cream she was 12. Her stepmother gave it to her but didn’t tell her what it was for. “She never explained it to me,” she says. “I just felt it was a normal cream, and I was using them. I was naïve and I was vulnerable.”
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