White Skin

One of the first things that any Westerner will notice upon turning on Thai television are the commercials. The products and their presentation ranges from laughable to incomprehensible. However, one of the products that really stands out as almost offensive is the skin whitening products that are nearly ubiquitous on Thai television.

The general format of the ad is to show an attractive but unfortunately darkly skinned Thai woman staring longingly at a Thai man who looks like an overly made-up Korean boy band member. The Korean/Thai man, whose sexuality is certainly questionable, completely ignores the woman who is left standing forlornly. As a western man, my impulse was just to assume that this was the narrative’s way of showing that he is indeed homosexual. However, then another attractive Thai woman will sweep into view. This Thai woman has dazzlingly bright white skin with none of that horrible, dirty brown color. The Korean/Thai man is immediately smitten with this so beautifully white woman. She notices his attraction, but walks by him with a big smile, because, hey, she’s got white skin and can get any boy band member she wants.

Then the commercial will show the white skinned dazzler in a little time lapse demonstration that shows how her originally brown skin was transformed into beautiful white over just a few days by the application of  over-priced bleaching agents. Better yet is when they show a little color strip like they have for buying paints that shows how many shades she has gone up.

And all the big names, Hindustan Unilever, L’Oreal SA, Beiersdorf AG and Emami Ltd., are in on it, pushing the beautiful white skin that every girl must dream about.

Perhaps most discouraging is when you go out with a girl and she holds her arm against yours (that’s not the discouraging part) and tells you how beautiful your pasty white skin is next to hers.

The preference for white skin stems from feudal times when white skin indicated that the woman has never stepped outside into the sun to do any sort of manual labor and so must be of a higher social rank. Darker skinned women were the ones who actually had to work, and so wealth and white became associated. Society is always looking for ways to segment and classify, and so the white/dark system of skin has been maintained since it still conveniently enforces the existing social status dominated by fair skinned Chinese Thais.