The Racist Quest for Global Beauty (Full Version)
Driving along the Metro Manila highway I was shocked to see the advertisement boards 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 beautiful and desirable and other skin colours are less than better, that can only mean worse. Newspapers and beauty shops all over Asia carry the same message – dark skin is inferior, white is right and it is might too.
A Manila newspaper advertisement made that point for a skin treatment centre it shamelessly boasted that it could provide “the Power of Fairer, Whiter Skin”. What superior power does white skin impart? That can be related to the arrogance and aggressiveness of Western civilisation that has a history of bloody war and colonial domination and as no other in history. This is particularly insulting to people who have suffered colonial domination by Caucasian conquerors like the Filipinos did under the Spanish and the American regimes.
Others say white skin is a superior standard of beauty, raising the question what is beauty? The advertisements imply that dark skin connotes weakness, inferiority and ugliness. The target of the skin whitening treatment, it says, is to eliminate “darker complexion”. “Whether you have sun-darkened or were born with naturally dark skin, Active Whitening Treatment will make it fairer, whiter. In no time you’ll see the beautiful difference”.
The audacity of these totally unacceptable racist products and services is scandalous. In effect they are promoting the superiority of white skinned people, the Caucasian race over all others. This is racism at it’s worst.
The marketing strategy is using superior racist concepts to intimidate and convince Asian peoples to use the product, they will become like Caucasians who are supposed to be beautiful, attractive and influential. Even the French beauty product company L’Oreal is claiming its skin whitener; ‘White Perfect’ will produce “a glowing from within”. Unilever makes the brand Pond’s, which is selling small sachets of ‘White Beauty’ skin whitening vitamin, targeting the low-income youth.
The merchants of these racial discriminating products are even using college professors and their students to sell the products to young students. This degrading racist tinged propaganda can only lower the self-esteem of all people especially the Asian youth.
The promotion of the white Caucasian model of beauty as superior to all others is not confined to skin colour and facial complexion but goes to the extent of promoting 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 propaganda and brain bleaching techniques are working. Asians, thoroughly brainwashed by the ‘White is Right’ strategy of the marketing moguls are turning to cosmetic surgery as never before to slice up their natural features and give them that western or Caucasian look associated with power, superiority and success.
The Asian edition of Newsweek magazine last November 10, 2003 devoted a cover story to The Perfect Face. We are introduced to Hao Lulu by this photo caption. “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 magazine story claims that there is an emerging global standard of beauty that is a mixture of East and West.
However there is no evidence nor example of a Caucasian woman undergoing cosmetic surgery to look Asian. The Harvard Medical school of psychologist admits that “There is still a huge influence from the Western Standard”. In other words the Asians are being persuaded that: the West is best and East is least”.
Is this the western controlled global trend to have all of us standardised, not only the same products, procedures, life styles, but our facial make up too. It is a kind of commercialised ethnic cleansing - cosmetically that is. A Korean university professor told Newsweek, “On the streets of Seoul these days, we see so many same looking standardised young people produced by the same surgery”. Globalisation will have truly conquered all, even the way we look if we don't assert our individual dignity and oppose the racist products that aim to make us feel inferior.
