Open any bathroom cabinet in Lahore, Karachi or Sheikhupura and
you will find roughly the same four things. A whitening cream.
A tub of parlour bleach. A face serum being used on underarms
because there was nothing else. And a razor designed for a
man’s jawline, being dragged across an inner thigh.
None of it was built for the job.
The whitening creams worked for about a week. They stripped the
surface, the tone lifted, and then it came back darker than
before, because that is what happens when you injure skin and it
responds with more pigment, not less.
The face serums were formulated for cheek skin, which is roughly
0.02mm thick and lives in open air. Underarm skin is thicker,
folds in on itself all day, sits under fabric, and deals with
heat, sweat, friction and a blade every few days. It is a
completely different environment and it needs a completely
different formula.
And the parlour appointment cost around Rs.2,250, lasted about
three weeks, and had to be booked again before every wedding,
every Eid, every occasion where you wanted to wear something
sleeveless.
We did that arithmetic once. Roughly
Rs.27,000 a year, for a result that never stayed.
“Every woman we spoke to had the same three products and the
same complaint. Nothing was built for the body.”
Why Regalians exists