Dr. Isima Sobande was in medical school when she first heard of mothers who bleached the skin of their babies.

She dismissed it as an urban myth. But it wasn’t long before she saw it with her own eyes.

At a health centre in Lagos, a mother brought in a two-month-old infant who was crying in pain.

“He had very large boils all over his body,” the soft-spoken 27-year-old Nigerian told AFP. “It seemed like they weren’t normal.”

The baby’s mother explained that she had mixed a steroid cream with shea butter and slathered his skin with it in order to make it whiter.