A comedian was joking on comedy radio about the difficulty of finding bandages for his darker skin colour. “You’d think that a company named Johnson & Johnson…”
The primary purpose of a bandage is to protect a wound, reduce bleeding and promote healing, preferably with minimal scar. But he obviously has a point, and it is possible there was/is a market for the many varied skin tones that exist. Who wants to highlight an accidental cut? Did anyone exploit this? Now there are clear bandages… but they have other issues.
The purpose of making ‘flesh’ colored Band-Aids was to protect etc., and to make the bandage less noticeable. Otherwise for that last part, they could have just made them white. For a very long time ‘flesh’ referred only to ‘white’ people. Sometime in the very late 20th century major brands offered different colors, long after decorative bandages in non-skin colors were made. I think some minor brands target marketed darker skin people earlier than that.
Every year when I see the display of latex appliances at Spirt Halloween I remark how they are made only in a pale peach. I assume that brownish people also want to have third eyes and vampire bite marks. Why nobody manufactures and sells such a thing baffles me.
Bloom County had a strip commenting on the lack of darker shades of Band Aids back around 1980 or so.
Evidently people started marketing darker shades shortly before 2000. Here’s an article on the topic:
As for those Halloween appliances – as someone who has done a lot of such makeup over the years, I know that the pin shade they sell it in doesn’t really match anyone’s skin all that well. I’ve always painted over the appliances and my skin so that they’re the same shade. That said, it’s easier for me to do than someone with darker skin. I suspect they won’t change it until it makes economic sense (i.e. – when more people demand it Until then, either cast your own appliances (if doing latex is too much work, you can do a surprisingly good job with gelatin) or reconcile yourself to painting them over.
I’m assuming that the manufacturers (who are in business for the money) crunched numbers and decided that the increased revenue from adding multiple* new SKUs for their product was less than the increased cost of producing, storing, and distributing them.
*There isn’t just “pink” and “brownish”–how many variations would they need to make between Seal and Seal’s teeth?
Yeah exactly. I never really saw it as a race thing, since band aids are a poor match for lots of white people too.
Although…this was in the UK, where the standard color was a kind of eggshell brown that doesn’t match anybody. I noticed some here describing band aids as pink and on googling I see that there is a pinkish color which I’m assuming is more common in the US.
I’m currently in China…the standard band aid here seems to again be the eggshell brown that doesnt match anyone.
Although I hadn’t thought about it before reading this post, that explains the blue bandages I keep seeing on the Great British Baking Show. I had never heard of this practice before.