Presented with absolutely no comment:
Yang Mingxuan, nicknamed Aki, follows a careful morning routine. First, applying FOUR creams specially designed to lighten her skin.
“In China,” she said through a translator, “there is an old saying, that fairness covers one hundred faults.”
Credit: CBS News
Then, a special diet of foods that she believes have skin-lightening abilities: Milk and Chinese yams. She said, “If you eat dark, like soy sauce, you will get dark.”
Also, she keeps well-hidden from the sun when she’s outside. “It shows that a woman takes good care of her skin, and more people will be jealous of her.”
[…] TV advertising is making sales of skin lightening products a $2 billion a year business in China, and still growing, in a country where a focus on beauty is one of the benefits of new-found wealth, and where many Chinese women think fairer skin makes it easier to get everything from a better job to a better boyfriend. And here’s the OLD part, going back, say some, to 700 BC, as depicted in the 2006 film “The Banquet” – a time when rich women at the Imperial court used ground-up pearls as a white face powder to give them that light complexion.
[…]
“Those who work outside, till the fields, of course tend to acquire a very dark complexion, whereas those inside – nobles, aristocracy – highly value white skin as a result, or lighter skin,” said Dikotter. “Women in Europe and North America tend to want to have a tan skin … whereas in China, what is wanted is very clear complexion.”
At a Chinese beach, one can see the anti-sun mask, a full head-and-neck no-tan system.
And for those with money to spend who want to take it a step further, there is another expensive fashion trend ready to help out. At the EverCare plastic surgery center in downtown Beijing, Dr. Chang Weiling shows off before-and-after pictures of saggy skin tightened, noses reshaped, and skin lightened with freckles gone, thanks to laser treatments and whitening injections.
“You know, no one would like to be called a ‘yellow-face woman,’ so you have to get rid of brown spots in order to maintain a fair color,” said Dr. Chang, through an interpreter.
Which brings us back to Aki. […] “For you, what color are you trying to achieve?” Petersen asked.
“My ideal is, of course, to have even, white, luminous and smooth silk, like the egg white of a boiled egg,” she replied. [source]
Okay… so, maybe one comment: doesn’t this all sound familiar?
I just…I guess this is what happens when we only allow for one idea of “beauty.” People are resigned to buying billions in products to chase after it.
For goodness sakes, how many white women have skin “like the egg white of a boiled egg?”
Someone help me out with this?