FEATURE-Camel milk: put it on your face as well as drink it

By Pascal Fletcher

NOUAKCHOTT, April 3 (Reuters) - With its hunched back, protruding teeth, facial hair and distinctive body odour, the camel may not seem an ideal model for beauty products.

Think again, says Nancy Abeiderrahmane, who runs a camel dairy in the Saharan state of Mauritania and says vitamin-rich camel milk can cleanse the body both inside and out.

"It does give you a nice complexion," says British-born Abeiderrahmane, who in 1989 opened Africa's first commercial camel milk dairy, now called Tiviski, in Mauritania's capital Nouakchott.

With the dairy already producing a range of camel, cow and goat milk products in a nation where nomadic livestock rearing is a way of life, the Spanish-trained engineer is now looking at the possibility of making camel milk cosmetics.

"We would make creams and soaps," said Abeiderrahmane, who has lived in Mauritania for 30 years and is a citizen of the former French colony lying on the Sahara's western edge. "I'm thinking very upmarket," she added.

Recalling that Egypt's Queen Cleopatra, a fabled beauty, was said to bathe daily in camel's milk, she said Mauritanian Moorish women still traditionally drank large quantities of this milk to maintain a pale, clear complexion.

"It's a cleaning stuff, it's good for your arteries, it's a diuretic," Abeiderrahmane said.