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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

What struck me as odd in Asia were all the skin whitening products. Even regular cosmetics had "Whitening" plastered over it.

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You see a lot of that in the Philippines especially. Everyone wants to be as white as possible, so they carry umbrellas to block the sun, and use whitening lotions and soaps. Contrast that with the US, where people want to be tan, to the point of using tanning salons and spray-on tans.

Yes, I'm Filipino and light skinned, and the first thing people notice about me when I'm there is how light skinned I look. They associate this with beauty. People over there have this obsession with being white, with all the heart throb celebrities looking light skinned and "mestizo," and all the comedians and funny characters looking dark and more malay.

How's this for irony...My fiancee is Filipina, and she has become more tan since living in the US (we go to the Caribbean about once every two months). When we went to the Philippines this past May, she got lots of compliments on her tan from Filipinos. It turns out that her tan skin and the fact that she's with me (a light-skinned Black American) made her look more American, so being tan was more desirable in their eyes.

That is indeed ironic. I've never heard of Filipinos complementing on how tan someone is, though there is a certain shade of tan called "kayumangi" that sort of exemplifies "Filipino Beauty." Filipino views on the various shades of skin color can get kind of confusing.

I had initially assumed that whitening creams were used to create a caucasian look - an idea which I found quite repulsive. When a friend explained that it was to mimic the appearance of the upperclass, whose skin colour contrasted with a labourer's, it began to make sense. When thought of as a status enhancer, it doesn't seem that disimilar to tanning..

It's funny, a friend of mine asked me why "all Japanese people want to look white" as I am from japan (I don't look even a little bit white, let alone Japanese). The fact is that paleness has been associated with beauty there since before they knew that Caucasians even existed. So I don't particularly have an answer, but it's clear that it's not that they want to be white because Caucasians are white.

+1 for not looking Japanese.

A former hostel-mate of mine was Japanese and we would hangout with the Japanese expats in Shanghai. 100% of the time, Japanese people would speak English to him. I forgot where exactly in Japan he is from, but he said everyone in his home town looked like him, but Japanese people elsewhere would assume he is something else; 6.4 tall, full beard, and looked a lot like Tarkan, the Turkish singer:

http://www.frogview.com/uploadimages101/476366f66b4d62.07061...

A year later when I went to Japan I found out how unusual looking he was.

Lighter skin is universally more feminine. In any ethnicity the women are lighter skinned and usually have lighter hair. Observing women using skin whitening products and dying their hair does not necessarily lead to some class/race social analysis. It can be fundamentally the same thing as using lipstick to emphasize the natural female tendency of darker and fuller lips.

Up to about 100 years ago, this was common in Europe (and probably America) as well: when 90%+ of the populace were poor agriculture workers, white skin was a status symbol. This eventually reversed when most work moved indoors, and a tan became something acquired on vacations.

The open question is why Japan, as dominated by clerical work as any other fully industrialized country, still retains the ideal of white skin. OTOH, it's a generational thing there as well: deep, fake tans are quite popular among school-age girls (and guys).

Some examples of the extreme fake tan style that peaked around 2000 (ganguro): http://www.yopress.com/japanese/japanese-style-extreme-tanni...

Yes, and the "best" whitening products are made in Japan. Fair skin is often considered a desirable thing among many of the Asian cultures.

A distinction needs to be made. Most of the Asians using whitening products aim to get the skin to #ffffff, not the color of caucasian skin. Caucasians are a few tints darker than #ffffff.

#fff would make a great brand-name in a nerdy nonsensical nike swoosh kind of way

When I lived in Korea it was explained to me that farmers and peasants had darker complexions because they were out in the sun all day. Having lighter skin was a matter of class distinction, and it had nothing to do with Western influence.

That argument strikes me as disingenuous. Being fat used to be a class distinction (poor people couldn't afford to be fat) but it's not popular today. I suspect preference for lighter skin color is more self-racist than people like to portray (even to themselves).

Actually, lighter skin used to be an issue for westerners too. Lighter skin suggested the same thing as it did in Asia and tanned skin was looked down upon. Recently, with the massive changes in the economy over the past hundred or so years, tanned skin has begun to demonstrate leisure and wealth more than paleness, so the situation has reversed. Korea and Japan have modernized much recently than America and the West so that could be the reason.

I think the preference for lighter-colored skin in China dates back to when they thought westerners were ugly, smelly barbarians. That isn't to say that modern perceptions of whites as modern and superior isn't a factor now, but it is a relatively late influence on the phenomenon.

Addressing specifically your comment on being fat: this could be explained by the fact that getting fat is no longer expensive.

[Edited from one of my comments ( http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/08/30/guest-post-w... ) at the article]

Many people want to show that they have the financial means to enjoy leisure - whether that be because you’re well paid enough to take holidays, or because you employ others. Most of the westernised world aims to get a tan - it shows that we have the means to go to far away sunny places and laze in the sun. Conversely, in Asia, a tanned skin is what you get from labouring outdoors (farming, for example), and so light skin is a sign of a leisurely life.

And if you can’t afford a leisure lifestyle, you can buy the appearance of one in a bottle: fake tan, or skin bleacher.

True, but this is not unique to Asia. In Middle east and parts of Europe I've seen a similar attitudes, especiall towards beauty in women. Also in the US, "redneck" is used as a pejorative term.

'"redneck" is used as a pejorative term.'

Right, because it refers to the guy with a red neck and bright white chest when he takes his shirt off, because he actually is working outdoors properly dressed for such work, not on a beach somewhere getting a leisurely tan. Thus, a red neck indicates working class.

Actual red necks, of course, seem to use it as a term of endearment and solidarity, much as other epithets have been co-opted by their targets.

What about the eyelid surgery that is all the rage?

I think this is certainly an example of real people aiming for a western ideal of beauty.

However, a quick google search http://bit.ly/bHOnEC doesn't show a particular bias for double or single eyelids in anime.

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