This discussion on Racialicious reminds me of those horrible skin lightening product commercials I saw on television the last time I was in Manila. If you’re Filipina, you know the brand I’m talking about. Block & White. And if you’re not Filipina but Asian, you probably have equivalent products and brands.
I was no longer surprised that the skin whitening ads—largely aimed at women, btw—equate fairness with beauty, popularity. Nor was I surprised that milky white skin is equated with being healthy. The ads aren’t even subtle about their colorism. The Block & White deodorant stick ad, for example, repeats the phrase “So dry! So white!” like a mantra.
But I admit being taken aback by the following ads:
I think it’s juuuust wonderful—really!—that these ads go beyond outer beauty, don’t you? Being fair-skinned is a virtue. ‘Cause having white underarms allows a Filipina woman to rise above the rest, reach out, and inspire others.
Edited to add:
I just made my partner M view a slew of Block & White ads on YouTube (aww, the things he does for me!), and he pointed out the insidious language used in the other ads. In one ad, a pretty young woman rubs Block & White lotion all over her body, as the voiceover promises whiter skin in just two weeks. But the phrasing is notable — “Ilabas ang natural na puti.” Or in English, “Bring out your natural whiteness.”
Whoa. Whiteness is natural, just lurking beneath the surface of your brown skin. (So what’s the brown layer? Dirt? It’s something to be removed and expended.) Not fairer skin, but puti, whiteness. Even in a country of brown people, whiteness is the norm.
[...] of whiteness is truly entrenched in Filipino society. Just consider the popularity of those skin bleaching lotions that let the brown masses show their “natural [...]
I just strolled over her via Racialicious and I’m going to chime in on the whitening front. I lived in Indonesia for three years and that stuff is everywhere. Some of it is incredibly expensive (Dior, SKII) and some of it is dead cheap. The dead cheap stuff is sold in the local markets; while I was there several brands were banned after it was discovered they contained lead. You could pick the women who used the cheaper ones (which contain bleach! ACTUAL BLEACH!) as they’d have these strange mottled marks on their faces. Meanwhile, as a white girl with serious freckles I had shop assistants trying to flog me this junk: “Oh, but they are ugly miss!” Thanks.
Indonesian whitening advertising included things like students laughing at a teacher with some sort of rosacea and the suggestion that if you don’t whiten up, your boyfriend will dump you for a paler girl.
These are all inevitably advertised by actresses who are dutch-Indonesian (or whatever) and so have paler skin than any poor girl from the villages of Java can ever expect to be.
But the ultimate insult? The Body Shop, home to a million “love yourself”-type advertising campaigns, flogs its own whitening lotion. I haven’t bought their stuff since. What a pack of hypocrites.
The beauty industry has managed to convince white girls that they need a skin-cancer inducing tan to be beautiful, and dark girls that they need to cover themselves in products that are overpriced ineffective tubs of cream at their best and poisonous potions at their worst. I say to hell with the lot of them.
I’m glad you strolled in, Jen, thank you for commenting. I’m glad you point out the link between the creation of false needs, for whitening lotions on one hand and tanning products on the other. And the class differences that are embedded in the type of products being marketed. Hmmm, there’s a post there somewhere, I’ll be thinking more.
I was also quite disappointed upon learning of The Body Shop’s whitening products and their ties with L’Oreal and Nestle. There was a discussion on one of the big feminist blogs about this, and it was disheartening to see women who identify as feminist dismiss the hypocrisy because “at least they’re doing something.” Sigh.