‘Racist’ product Skin-whitening facial mask shocks customer
It’s a skin whitening facial - that’s just not acceptable , you shouldn’t be selling these products in this day and age, let alone in Bristol, which is so multi-cultural
ACustomer Deborah
WESTBURY-ON-TRYM pharmacy has apologised for stocking a mask for “whitening” skin.
Westbury Pharmacy, in Charlecombe Court, will no longer offer the product – made by Korean company Purederm – after a complaint from a customer who described it as “racist”.
The pharmacy’s director Mitul Patel told the Post’s website Bristol Live he was unaware the £3.87 item was being stocked. He said the product is “appalling” and “racially insensitive”.
Mr Patel accepted the branch must take responsibility for the mask being on its shelves, but he expressed shock that its supplier Fortuna Healthcare had distributed the product.
Fortuna has said it had withdrawn the item from sale “with immediate effect”.
Deborah, who did not wish to give her surname, made the complaint after going into the pharmacy earlier this week to pick up a prescription for her 10-year-old child.
She said: “I popped in and was waiting at the counter to collect it. I saw this box, and at first I was like, ‘Maybe I’ve misunderstood, maybe it’s for teeth or something.’”
The packaging for the Purederm “whitening facial essence mask” offered “visibly whitening, antiaging and moisturising treatment”. It also read: “Made in Korea.”
Deborah said: “I thought, ‘That’s just mental.’ Eventually the pharmacist came back with the prescription, and I just asked him why they were selling this stuff.
“He looked like he had not really registered that product before and didn’t know what it was. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know.’
“I told him, ‘It’s a skin whitening facial - that’s just not acceptable, you shouldn’t be selling these products in this day and age, let alone in Bristol, which is so multicultural.’
“He seemed a bit taken aback, and said, ‘Yeah, I agree, I’ll speak to my boss.’ A few people in the queue behind me were like, ‘Oh God, that’s shocking.’”
Deborah, a teacher who lives in the area, added she had heard of skin bleaching products in the media but had never seen an item like this herself.
She said: “I don’t know if they’re sold abroad and seen as a beauty standard but in our society it’s just not acceptable. That is racist, essentially.
“Does the pharmacy not engage with the products? You enter an NHS pharmacy and it’s meant to be an area where you trust what’s on the shelf.
“It’s there for your health and you think it’s been vetted. It’s great the guy agreed with me, but you also wonder why it was on the shelf in the first place.”
Mr Patel, who runs the pharmacy and three others in Bristol, said he would find it “insulting” if he walked into a shop which was selling the item.
“We get our over-the-counter products from Fortuna, one of the biggest suppliers to pharmacies across the country,” he said. “They’re the ones that supplied it to us without my knowledge.
“They need to answer the question of why they were selling it to pharmacies. I genuinely can’t believe they’ve supplied that to us, to be honest. I’m an Asian man myself and I find it appalling.
“Clearly we should have spotted it at our end. I don’t think our members of staff had even looked at it. We took this branch over from LloydsPharmacy a few months ago, and we had to fill up with stock because the shelves were bare.
“If you are mechanically pricing everything up and doing lots of stock, things get missed. It’s clearly a failing on our part, but it’s not a case of us trying to sell something racially insensitive. It’s a case of us not knowing.
“It’s going straight off our shelves and I’ve sent an email to all the pharmacies in our group, to make sure they’re not stocking it by mistake. We’re a small company and don’t always have the mechanisms to spot these things. However, it shouldn’t have gone out.”
When we approached Fortuna, its spokesman said it would withdraw the product from the market “with immediate effect pending a full review”.
Purederm, the Korean firm behind the product, has not responded to our approach for comment.
Forbes reports that skin-lightening products are “a controversial market worth billions of dollars” and “especially popular in Africa, Asia and the Middle East”.
Last year L’Oreal removed words including “white” and “light” from its skin-evening products, shortly after Unilever removed the words “fair/fairness, white/whitening, and light/lightening” from some product packaging.