Sammy Sosa doing a Michael Jackson?

[Dr Mordrid]

You decide if the notorious baseball player is getting his skin bleached out....

Personally I don't care, save for feeling sorry over his obvious self-loathing of his color. The black community in Detroit is all abuzz about it and it's reached the editorial page of the Detroit Free Press..... Sad to say, there is prejudice in the black community here where darker skinned blacks are looked down on by lighter skinned blacks. Some of the background for this is covered on page 2 of the Free Press article.

Any black persons want to comment on his choice to do this?

My combination of before/after photos - unretouched or gamma corrected in any way

[Tjalfe]

wow.. he even got his irises bleached, this guy is hard core

[Dr Mordrid]

Age, contacts or disease can change eye color. You should see my Halloween contacts, worn with a werewolf outfit.

[Brian Ellis]

The photos may be 'unretouched', but they should be! They are not comparable. The left one has a distinct yellow cast and low brightness (look at the teeth, whites of eyes, shirt collar etc., against a white background. The right one has bluish cast and has high brightness but a darker background and very frontal lighting (flash). The choice of photos was obviously made to exaggerate grossly the before and after effect. Both photos show evidence of photoshopping.

[Dr Mordrid]

AP published both pictures months apart.

His eyes look like he's had an eyelid trimming - note the bags and wrinkles are gone. That would cause his whites to show more and look brighter. Common plastic procedure here. Also looks like he had some work done on his lips.

Yellow teeth can be bleached, just like skin.

You don't have a yellow or light blue shirt? Not many men here wear pure white shirts anymore save for formal wear.

Right pic is obviously a flash, bright but not that bright.

[VJ]

Funny, my first thoughts also went to the poor choice of photos to compare: eyes, teeth, ...
The shot on the right looks to me like it was overexposed by a flash, and then corrected for this (poorly) in PhotoShop. Whitebalance also looks off. The hair on the photograph on the right also looks odd.

[Dr Mordrid]

More...

http://power953.com/blogs/power_pic/2009/11/sammy-sosa-admits-to-bleaching.html

Speaking publicly for the first time since photos of him from a recent musical awards ceremony were published on the Interbet, Sosa said that the skin lightening is the result of the use of a facial cosmetic cream. It's a bleaching cream that I apply before going to bed and whitens my skin some," said the former slugger during the "Primer Impacto" program at the Univision Spanish network.

"It's a cream that I have, that I use to soften [my skin], but has bleached me some. I'm not a racist, I live my life happily," said a smiling Sosa during the interview

He's doing it more than to soften his skin as it's in his ears, around his neck and looks to be everywhere else