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By Opeyemi Lawal
Claim: Beverly Naya, a popular Nollywood actress and filmmaker, said in an interview with One54Africa, a popular podcast platform, that about 77% of Nigerian women bleach their skin.
Verdict: Partly True! The World Health Organization reports that 77% of Nigerian women bleach their skin. However, the statistics are outdated, and the study is limited to Lagos residents in the 1990s.
Full Text
An Instagram post by @One54Africa has caused a stir online. The page with over 400k followers shared an interview with popular Nollywood actress Beverly Naya, in which they discussed the actress’ versatile career and impactful work. During the interview, Beverly spoke about her 2019 Netflix documentary ‘Skin,’ which explored colourism and discrimination against Africans based on the shades of their skin.
The same claim has appeared here, here and here on Facebook.
According to Naya, she created the movie to resonate with Nigerian women who have faced rejection because of their skin colour. She said the discrimination has evolved into making Nigerian women the highest consumers of bleaching creams in Africa, as 77 per cent of them bleach their skin. A statistic suggests that seven out of every 10 Nigerian women seek to lighten their skin for social acceptance, and that the country leads the continent in the use of bleaching creams.
She added that all of this is fueled by the hierarchy of beauty based on lighter skin colours.
“I got bullied when I was a teenager. Well, even before that, I got bullied. It wasn’t really colourism attached, per se, but it definitely affected my self-esteem when I was young and in my formative years,” she said.
“When I moved to Nigeria, I knew that I wanted to start an anti-bullying campaign. That was my original goal, but then I felt like I wanted something that would actually resonate. I started researching and stumbled upon a quote by Willie Lynch.
“He said, ‘Divide the Blacks by complexion and rule them for 300-plus years.’ That’s what he said. And that basically sparked the movement of Skin and the documentary and everything because Nigerian women are the highest consumers of bleaching cream in Africa.
“Seventy-seven per cent of Nigerian women bleach their skin. When you think about it, you think back to this quote, and you’re like, ‘You’re really dividing us till today.’ There’s this hierarchy of beauty by complexion, where the lighter you are, the better you are, culturally.
“It’s not even just about the skin. It’s even the words that we use. Being called ‘blackie’ or people making negative comments about your skin, that in itself is a form of bullying. It’s normalised bullying. It’s something that we just grew up with, and we thought, ‘Oh, it’s just a joke.’ But it’s not a joke. It’s colourism.”
However, Beverly’s statistics that 77 per cent of Nigerian women bleach their skin did not sit well with many people. Many Instagram users particularly argued that her claim was exaggerated.
Screenshots of multiple comments on the post.
The post has recorded over 4,800 likes, 1,276 shares, and 368 reshares. It has also amassed 1,095 comments, one of which is from Vivynonsin Ugwulonu, who stated that the claim was largely exaggerated. “Bleaching can be a thing in Nigeria, but 77% is damn exaggerating.”
Further, Folasade Oni, a branding personality, added that the 77 per cent claim means that eight out of every 10 woman in Nigeria bleach their skin.
“Seventy-seven Haba! So basically almost 8 out of every 10 Nigerian women are bleaching? This doesn’t even make sense. It cannot even be up to 5%. And let us be careful about the sort of narratives we put out there as these things become stereotypes.”
Ricaskills, another user, said that while bleaching is common in Nigeria, the claim is excessively exaggerated. “Bleaching is a thing, but that stat is excessively exaggerated.” He also said that the statistics imply that 91.63 million Nigerian women bleach their skin. “Nigerian women population is roughly about 119 million. Are you saying that 91.63 million of them bleach their skin?”
DUBAWA has decided to fact-check this claim because of its virality and its tendency to cause deep stereotypes for Nigerian women.
Verification
To verify this claim, DUBAWA searched for supporting evidence from the World Health Organisation (WHO). DUBAWA found a factsheet published by the organisation with the heading: “Skin bleaching in Africa…a public health problem.”
According to the November 2023 Analytical Fact Sheet, skin bleaching in Africa is not a beauty phenomenon but one deeply rooted in the transatlantic slave trade and continued during the European colonisation of African nations.
It revealed that bleaching statistics vary among African countries, from 25 per cent in Mali to 77 per cent in Nigeria. The study further listed Nigeria as the country with the highest bleaching rate. This is followed by Congo-Brazzaville at 66 per cent and Senegal at 50 per cent, while Ghana trails behind at 39 per cent.
(Screenshots of extracts of the study from WHO)
Meanwhile, another study by Yetunde Olumide, a professor of Medicine at the University of Lagos in 2017, stated that 64 per cent of Nigerians think that skin bleaching has become highly prevalent in the country, especially amongst Nigerian women. This study also heavily hinges on the WHO 77 per cent claim, even though it was published earlier.
The study made reference to the fact that Nigeria has been described as the “world capital of skin bleaching” and “the skin lightening hothouse of the world”, while referring to an epidemiological survey on the use of cosmetic skin-lightening products among traders in Lagos. This study by Adebayo SB found that bleaching products are prevalent among women traders by 72.4 per cent and among their men by 27.6 per cent.
The study revealed that Nigeria is being described as the “world capital of skin bleaching” and “the skin lightening hothouse of the world.”
However, DUBAWA found that an April 2019 fact-check by Africa Check traces the WHO 77 per cent claim to the same study done by Adebayo. It revealed that the study was carried out in three markets in Lagos from May to July 1998.
It further shows that 77.3 per cent of the 450 traders interviewed were exposed to bleaching products. This comprises 96 men at 27.6 per cent and 252 women at 72.4 per cent.
This shows that the widely quoted 77.3 per cent figure as the bleaching rate of Nigerian women is only from a select sample restricted to a particular location and does not represent the statistics for all Nigerian women across the country.
Conclusion
DUBAWA’s findings show that the data used to support the claim is outdated, dating back over 27 years. Also, the survey is restricted to a sample of 450 people, even though Nigeria has over 200 million people and 36 states. Hence, results from interviewing 450 people in a state cannot be used as a metric for the female populace in Nigeria.
This report was produced under the 2026 Kwame Karikari Fact-checking and OSINT Fellowship, co-hosted by DUBAWA and the Digital Technology, Artificial Intelligence, and Information Disorder Analysis Centre (DAIDAC), with support from the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID).
