The Racist Quest for Global Beauty
The Universe
(January 25, 2004)
DRIVING along the Metro Manila highway I was shocked to see billboards telling the good-looking and beautiful brown-skinned Filipinos to use skin bleaching cream and “get 99% Whiter, Better”.
Simply put, it says that white skin is most desirable and other colours are worse. Newspapers and beauty shops all over Asia carry the same message - dark skin is inferior, white is right and it might.
But what superior power does white skin impart? That can be related to the arrogance and aggressiveness of Western civilisation that has a history of war and colonial domination. This view is particularly insulting to peoples who have suffered colonial domination by Caucasian conquerers like the Filipinos did under the Spanish and the Americans.
The advertisements imply that dark skin connotes weakness, inferiority and ugliness. The target of the skin whitening treatment, they says, is to eliminate “darker complexion
The audacity of these totally unacceptable racist products and services is scandalous. They are promoting the superiority of white skinned people, racism at it’s worst.
The French beauty product company L’Oreal is claiming its skin whitener, ‘White Perfect’ will produce “a glowing from within”. Unilever is selling small sachets of ‘White Beauty’, a skin whitening vitamin aimed to low income youths.
The white Caucasian
model of beauty also promotes cosmetic surgery to change the shape of
the face, nose, ears and eyes. It is a business that is worth US$160
Billion annually.
The Asian edition of Newsweek magazine last November 10 devoted a cover story to ‘The Perfect Face.’ We are introduced to Hao Lulu: “In a cross-cultural transformation, Hao Lulu, 24, has undergone cosmetic surgery 14 times in an effort to reshape her face and body and Westernise her Asian features”. The story claims that there is an emerging global standard of beauty that is a mixture of East and West.
However there is no example of a Caucasian woman undergoing cosmetic surgery to look Asian. The Harvard Medical school psychologist admits that “There is still a huge influence from the Western Standard”
Is this the western-controlled trend to have all of us standardised, not only the same products, procedures and life styles, but our facial make-up too? Globalisation will have truly conquered all, even the way we look, if we don't assert our individual and oppose the racist products that make us feel inferior.
