Are There Any Safe Skin Lightening Products for Pregnancy?

My Sensitive Skincare Show Podcast #2

One of my readers asks whether the non-toxic skin lightening cream that I recommend is safe to use during pregnancy. Learn which skin whiteners I recommend, and some simple and quick tips to lighten your skin when you're pregnant. 

Resources Mentioned

This podcast refers to my article on safe skin bleaching creams which reveals the sad truth that most skin whitening products on the market today contain irritating or even toxic ingredients that can have intense health consequences, even if you are not pregnant!

Prefer to Read?  Here's the Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome once again to the My Sensitive Skin Care Show.  Today's topic is a reader question about safe skin lightening products for pregnancy.  One of her questions is also about one of our safe skin lightening creams that we recommend. So I will let her ask the question and then I will respond.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Shilpa, I'm from India. I've written to you several times on this site. Today, I have two questions.

One, I want a good, natural, safe whitening cream and the one that you recommend on the site is from the company Xtend Life and it's called Whitening Day Cream.

I wanted to double check with you to ask if that you would still recommend that and I would like to know if you have strong reviews, positive reviews on the product because it's quite expensive and if I’m going to order it, I want to be very, very sure.

Also, I’m pregnant so I wanted to ask if that product would be safe for me to use.

ANSWER: Hi Shilpa, it's nice to hear from you and thank you so much for your question.   Yes, I absolutely understand your question about looking for safe skin lightening products for pregnancy.

So what I would recommend, this is purely my opinion because I'm not a medical doctor ...  from everything that I’ve learned, and I have done quite a bit of research about this, is that pregnancy creates a lot of changes in your body.

Even natural ingredients such as the ingredients in the Xtend Life skin lightening product, those ingredients are generally quite safe, but there are a lot of botanical ingredients and I honestly don't know the effect that they may have on you or your baby.

Again, these are not really intense ingredients like some of the ones that you hear about that you absolutely shouldn't use like hydroquinone (ooops, I mispronounced this on my podcast!) and other things.

You know, the Xtend Life products are overall very safe. But I honestly would not recommend using any skin lightening product while you're pregnant or nursing.

Again that's purely my opinion, and you can ask your doctor if you're really feeling the need for something.  You could bring the ingredient's list of the Xtend Life skin lightening products and see what your doctor thinks about this.

What I would recommend is that you first explore some other types of skin lighteners. And just to backtrack for a moment, some of you might be wandering why are we talking about skin lightening in pregnancy.

Well, one of the things that happens when you're pregnant is sometimes your skin gets darker or you get dark patches on your skin. So that's why there's so many women out there who are looking for a safe skin lighteners that they can use while they're pregnant.

So here are a couple of very safe ingredients. Again, always check with your doctor because I don't know anything more than what I know, which is that there are there certain foods that most likely you'll be able to eat when you're pregnant that you could put on your skin.

One of them is honey which has natural hydrogen peroxide in it and it's used as a skin lightener as well as hair lightener.  Actually, I use it for my hair. You can use it by itself or with lemon juice or you could also use honey with almond paste and apply it to your skin and just see how you tolerate it.

Another possibility is lemon juice that's often very intense just used on its own, but you could mix it say with yogurt which is another natural food that has lightening properties.  Yogurt has natural alpha hydroxy acids in it,  there's a certain type of alpha hydroxy acids that are in dairy products.

So another natural skin lightener is milk powder which you could add to some of these other ingredients. You could make your own recipes and there are some popular combinations, for example:

• honey and almond paste
• honey and lemon juice
• lemons and cucumber

Cucumber is also known to have some skin lightening properties and so you can play with some of these single ingredients.

And also there are some women who have used coconut milk mixed with fresh pineapple. The pineapple has natural enzymes in it that can help with skin lightening. I do believe it has to be fresh though, not frozen or juiced.

And the other option, there's a fruit called papaya which contains an ingredient papain which is used in some natural safe skin lightening products, so you could also try applying papaya.

There are some recipes on the internet you can take a look at, if you search for natural recipes for safe skin lightening.

One other recipe I've seen is yogurt and orange juice.  

I’ve also seen some skin lightening recipes for orange peel, but that is a much more intense botanical ingredient. I personally wouldn't use it if you're pregnant, it's because of my experience with orange peel, it can be very strong.

So those are my recommendations to start. And again, I tend to err on the side of caution, but you can check all of these recommendations with your own doctor.

So listeners, I would love to hear your thoughts and any tips that you might have for safe skin lightening during pregnancy!  Please leave your comments below, or send me a voice mail from this page.

So please join me again for another edition of The My Sensitive Skincare Show and thank you so much for joining us.  Take care and blessings!