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In Buttoned Up, based on interviews with dozens of men in three U.S. cities with distinct local dress cultures--New York, San Francisco, and Cincinnati--Erynn Masi de Casanova asks what it means to wear the white collar now.

As a result of regulation, by 1980 the concentration of hydroquinone in skin-bleaching creams, soaps and ointments sold and or manufactured in South Africa had been reduced from an 8 percent to a 2 percent upper limit, though there was no medical evidence to indicate that 2 percent hydroquinone in skin-bleaching preparations would not cause skin damage. In addition, in a sort of perverse cynical gesture, the apartheid regime legislated that sunscreen protection be added to all skin-bleaching products manufactured and sold in South Africa with a minimum Sun Protection Factor 5. The addition of sunscreen was, supposedly, meant to minimize skin damage caused by hydroquinone poisoning. This is because it was suggested, without scientific evidence, that the damage to bleached skin is greater if exposed to the sun.(f.30) However, [G. H. Findlay] has shown that hydroquinone poisoning results not from exposure to sun but from accumulation of hydroquinone deposits inside the dermal and subcutaneous layers of the skin which leads to a permanent damage of the affected area of the skin. Under proper clinical tests, hydroquinone caused damage to the underlying tissues as well as to the epidermal layer, giving the appearance of patchy, sooty, coarse, brown, blue-back spots.(f.31) Taking a cue from the actions of the apartheid regime, medical authorities in Europe and North America followed suit and reduced the concentrations in over-the-counter hydroquinone skin-bleaching preparations to 2 percent. On the basis of the arbitrary decision made by one of the most racist regimes of the modern era, today you can buy 2 percent hydroquinone based skin- bleaching creams, soaps and ointments in almost all Canadian drug stores and \"beauty\" shops.Six years after the concentration in over-the-counter hydroquinone skin- bleaching chemical agents was reduced to 2 percent, another South African dermatologist, N. Hardwick, conducted a survey in two Pretoria research hospitals by randomly selecting 194 outpatient subjects who came to these research facilities for reasons other than skin problems. 53 males and 141 females were selected.(f.32) The result of this research was that 68 patients (35 percent of the total 195 patients) had exogenous ochronosis. Of the 68 patients with exogenous ochronosis, 12 patients who started using hydroquinone-based bleaching preparations after 1983 had the condition. In their analysis, Hardwick et al. (1989) had chosen 1983 as a cut-off-period to give the old hydroquinone-based skin-bleaching preparations containing 8 percent concentration sufficient time to be off the market. However, this new finding, which contradicted the claim that 2 percent hydroquinone is a \"safe\" skin- bleaching chemical, did not change the legal status of skin-bleaching products in apartheid South Africa or in the west. Hardwick's findings suggest that even in 2 percent concentration, hydroquinone causes skin damage. In addition, Schulz et al. (1990) have argued that skin damage resulting from hydroquinone poisoning depends on the amount of hydroquinone absorbed by the skin which, in turn, depends on the frequency and duration of application and not on the concentration in hydroquinone.(f.33)From this perspective, hydroquinone-based skin-bleaching practice has created two classes of users: black and other women of colour who are assumed to use hydroquinone and other skin-bleaching chemicals because they desire whiteness, and \"white\" women, who use skin-bleaching agents \"judiciously\" to remove blemishes, freckles and age spots.(f.34) In South Africa, the only country where substantive research on the phenomenon of skin-bleaching has been done, the primary subjects of inquiries have been exclusively black. The other three racial groups under the apartheid system, Asians, \"Coloureds\" and \"Whites,\" were not included in any of the published medical reports I have come across so far. Hence, the leading South African dermatologists who published on the problem of skin-bleaching, while agreeing that the biggest users of skin-bleaching were, indeed, white women, saw no need to see if white women who used hydroquinone-based skin-bleaching agents suffered similar medical conditions to those suffered by black women using the same skin-bleaching agents.(f.35)