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Wendy Knowler's Consumer Watch column
Skin tone remains a sticky issue

  Wendy Knowler
  January 20 2010 at 07:30AM

It struck me while I was having a drink at a beachfront hotel. The waiter two tables away had one of those round plasters in the middle of his forehead.

Designed to be inconspicuous on pale skin, it had the opposite effect on the waiter's dark brown skin.

And that's when I realised that I'd never seen a "skin tone" plaster in anything but that peachy colour - this in a country where the pale faces for which the colour was originally devised make up not even 10 percent of the population.

How absurd is that?

'YnotPLasts' are the first and only such plasters designed for skin other than white
I'm not sure that I'd want to walk around with a dark brown strip on my pale foot the next time a new pair of shoes gives me a blister.

In the UK, where people on whom peachy plasters stick out like neon signs are called "ethnic minorities", there is a range of plasters in varying degrees of brown, from mocha and cocoa to caramel, bronze and honey.

Admittedly, "YnotPLasts" are the first and only such plasters designed for skin other than white, and they only hit the UK market last May.

Creator Ndiho Sean Obedih, a 30-year-old student and entrepreneur, apparently got the idea on seeing a friend's child being bullied for wearing a conspicuous "white" plaster across his forehead after hurting himself in a playground.

I'm sure the waiter could relate - he may not have been bullied, but his head attracted an awful lot of stares.

He had no access to such "ethnic" plasters in this country - it was the pale pink round one, or a brightly coloured cartoon character strip.

I canvassed a few friends and colleagues of various hues about the issue, and all agreed the pink plaster thing is ridiculous, "come to think of it".

At least they're not called "flesh" coloured plasters in this country.

But why does the colonial throwback persist?

I asked Johnson and Johnson's corporate communications manager, Laura Nel.

"It's an issue that a number of consumers have raised over the years," she said.

"The current situation is that Band-Aid is fully imported from our affiliate company in Asia as we do not have the technology locally to produce plasters.

"This gives us less flexibility or influence around product design and features as we are more or less limited to what is available throughout the J and J world."

But there's a glimmer of hope for relevant plasters.

"Our marketing team is investigating what options are available within our present supply chain for a multiskin-toned variant and we have again highlighted the opportunity to our local research and development team," Nel said. "We remain hopeful."

Obedih's minority target market in the UK is just 4.6-million, compared with about 43-million in this country. A compelling argument for some skin-tone diverse Band-Aids.

If the big corporations can't inject some relevance into the sticky plaster market, maybe some enterprising entrepreneur can.






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