Not Your Barbie Girl: The Dangers Of Skin-Whitening Around The World
By Laura Hennawi & Emily Montague
Image courtesy of Daily Maverick South Africa, Illustrative image | Sources: Unsplash / Jurien Huggins | Keystone / Getty Images | Rawpixel
Since the early 1960s, the iconic Barbie doll has epitomized the female ideal. Each iteration has Barbie looking a little different. She follows the trends and preferences of the decade regardless of whether they’re healthy or not, and she teaches little girls what “pretty” means to the people around them. For most of her ongoing history, Barbie has been three things: skinny, blonde, and white.
Barbie is just one example of what we call “whitewashing” within the beauty industry. Whether it’s through toys–which are among the earliest teachers children have in a given society–or cosmetics, many of the things we use to define beauty are based on a white-skinned ideal.
One of the most pervasive results of whitewashing across the globe is the so-called skin brightening trend we see in countries as diverse as South Korea, India, and South Africa. Most of the people seeking whiter skin are women, and most of them are women of color. They are, in essence, trying to “undo” one of their own biologically-determined traits.
Skin brightening relies on a variety of chemical ingredients and cosmetic products to artificially lighten the tone of a person’s skin. This can be done through chemical bleaching, concealment, or blocking the effects of the sun’s UV rays. Some women use natural bleaching agents such as lemons and vinegar to lighten their skin. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for women to use toxic substances like lead, mercury, or even arsenic to achieve a pale, smoothed-out complexion.
No matter how or where skin brightening is practiced, it represents a problematic and one-sided view of beauty and the feminine ideal. Health complications aside, the very idea of whitening one’s skin brings to light a number of toxic assumptions many societies have about the inherent “goodness” of white skin vs. darker complexions. This plays out in a lot of ways, but one of the clearest examples can be seen in the marriage and dating markets of Southeast Asia.
Fair As The Moon Or Dark As Midnight–Fair Skin In History And Culture
In India, skin-lightening is popular amongst women who face pressure from family and community to appeal specifically to potential husbands. The preference for lighter skin and active discrimination against darker-skinned women is deeply rooted in the idea that lighter skin tones equal status and wealth.
Skin whitening is popular in East Asia, where some women go so far as to get routine IV injections to achieve it (photo courtesy of Adobe Free Stock).
Darker skin is associated with working outside, which implies that a woman is of a lower caste within the traditional and highly stratified Indian social structure. The preference for and dominance of lighter skin also has roots in the Western colonization of India by countries like Great Britain and France. Since the colonizers were white, lighter skin became associated with increased power, wealth, and social standing.
All of these factors have created an assumption amongst Indian men and their families that light skin is beautiful skin––but to have darker skin is considered unseemly and undesirable.
Similar pressures and assumptions play out in other Southeast Asian countries as well as many East Asian ones. Skin lightening traditions in South Korea and China remain rooted in the same status and power associations as those seen in India.
The women of Imperial China, for example, wished to emulate the sheltered and highly sedentary lifestyles of the Emperor’s concubines, wives, and daughters. Starting with the Wei Empire and remaining all the way through the eighty-three dynasties of Dynastic China, the tradition of skin-whitening remained a fixture of middle to upper-class life for millions of Chinese women. China remains the biggest market for skin-whitening products by a large margin.
In Korea, similar trends and pressures have played out over millennia, and the preference for white or “fair” skin is a well-recorded part of that country’s rich cultural heritage. Like the noble women of Dynastic China, Korean women wanted to appear wealthy and privileged––and therefore beautiful––by giving an impression of “high living.”
In essence, this meant that they wanted to appear different from the majority of Koreans, who spent their days working out in the fields. Pale skin denoted a person who was not forced to live this way. Unlike Indian and to some extent Chinese traditions, skin whitening has traditionally been gender-neutral in Korea. Both men and women seek fairer skin and both demographics purchase skin-whitening products in great quantities.
Pointing North–The Purpose Of Skin Tones And Why Nature Favors All Of Them
As cultures have mixed and white Westerners have exported their culture to every corner of the globe, other countries’ standards for what “fair” skin looks like have become less and less attainable for the majority of their population. White skin is a genetic abnormality that eventually became a common trait in certain parts of the world.
Research suggests that whiter skin helps to retain Vitamin D and provides some other selective benefits in cold climates, which was important for people living far from the tropics and the bright sunshine of equatorial regions.
This same trait becomes maladaptive in those sunny landscapes, however, as anyone who’s gotten a bad sunburn can tell you. People with darker skin, AKA more melanin, are better protected from the sun’s harmful UV rays. From a purely biological perspective, darker skin is healthier and therefore more desirable in most of the world, while whiter skin has been useful and therefore desirable in certain places and under certain conditions (such as those found in the far North).
Neither is inherently more desirable than the other. It is literally a simple matter of natural, evolutionary biology, and there are both exceptions and extremes within the racial landscape.
What isn’t natural (or healthy, or adaptive…) is the use of harmful, abrasive, and potentially carcinogenic products to artificially force darker skin to lighten by up to three shades. The short and long-term impacts of treatments such as IV-administered glutathione, which may cause significant damage to the liver, kidneys, and nervous system, are profound.
Sacrificial Offerings–The Choice Between Artificially Whiter Skin Or Authentically Better Health (Hint: We Can’t Have Both)
Many skin-bleaching treatments are linked to the development of severe conditions such as Steven Johnson Syndrome. This particular condition causes the entire top layer of the skin to itch, blister, and finally peel off in an awful process than can last for weeks at a time. Short-term burns, blisters, rashes, and peeling incidents are common amongst those who routinely bleach their skin. And that’s just the beginning of the potential health problems this “beauty” trend can cause.
CNN/LaylahBird/E+/Getty
Skin whitening is the use of cosmetic products or services to reduce the amount of melanin
Steroids like betamethasone and other corticosteroids are often used to treat skin conditions, but they also have a skin-lightening effect. They are therefore common ingredients in products specifically marketed as “skin-whitening” or “skin-brightening.” These steroids contain addictive properties and can cause myriad side effects, including a condition called Topical Steroid Damaged/Dependent Face (TSDF). Once the skin is dependent on the steroid, discontinuing its use is difficult––and dangerous––due to a number of harsh withdrawal symptoms.
Another problem with skin-whitening products is one that dates back thousands of years: the inclusion of mercury. Many creams and topical lotions explicitly advertised as skin-lightening contain this poisonous metal. This is despite the fact that it is banned in most countries due to its well-known toxicity when applied to the human body.
Mercury has long been used in skin-whitening topicals despite the known dangers of mercury poisoning. The same was true of lead, which was such a significant issue that it affected maternal mortality and birth rates in countries like China and India. Lead and mercury were also added to the powders used by white women during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. There appears to be no limit to our desire to be ever whiter and fairer––historically, we have even risked our lives to fit these unrealistic and incredibly unhealthy standards.
Personally, I’m Pooped–The Authors’ Experiences With Exhausting Beauty Standards And White-Centric Trends
I and my co-author write this piece as two women with different experiences regarding our skin and the cultural pressures we face to conform to Western beauty standards. I am an Arab-Syrian immigrant who has faced pressure to be “whiter,” thinner, more hairless, and more Barbie-like all her life. It is often my own family members and fellow Arabs who make references to weight loss, hair, and even unchangeable characteristics like my nose and body type.
Our Managing Editor, Emily, is a naturally fair-skinned white woman who is married to an Arab man who happens to have dark skin. He’s talked about the fairer skin of his female relatives versus his male ones, and much of this can be attributed to their efforts to avoid tanning and the pressure they face to have whiter skin than the men they are married to.
Emily herself has learned to be quite conscious of the ways her classically European features and naturally pale skin impact the perceptions others have of her. This became especially apparent when she lived in India for half a year. The attention she received from her Indian classmates and from strangers all over the subcontinent was largely focused on her skin and features––she saw skin-whitening advertisements all over the billboards in major cities and saw them played on TV channels in multiple languages. It was a distinctly uncomfortable experience for her, but she was glad to have it. It opened her eyes to something she might never have noticed, otherwise.
Beauty standards are becoming more inclusive thanks to the activism and advocacy of millions of men and women all over the world (photo courtesy of Adobe Free Stock).
Our experiences are just two small facets of a global phenomenon. Whitewashing our idea of beauty not only hurts girls’ and women’s physical health, but it’s harming their mental health as well. The pressure to conform to white beauty standards is jarring for those who are simply not white. It is invalidating and hurtful to be told, day after day and from every angle, that your natural-born beauty is not beautiful at all. It is wrong for us to feel that we need to change our entire appearance to suit the tastes of a bygone era that should have died long ago.
Luckily for us, things are beginning to change.
The fact that this topic even warrants a whole article is an indication of the times. Companies like Dove, Vogue, Aveeno, and many others are now making a sincere effort to include many different skin tones in their marketing. People are criticizing references to skin-whitening in foreign television shows and are speaking about it with a new, more inclusive perspective.
We all deserve better than to live under the pressures of a racist, patriarchal set of beauty standards that are not only exclusionary but impossible for most of the world’s women to achieve. We need to question them, and we need to continue to fight them.
I’m glad to be a part of that fight, and I’m glad we have allies like our Fem Word Partners to fight with us. That’s what it’s going to take to see real change happen. It starts with awareness: it starts with you.
A big thank you to Dahiya facial Plastic Surgery and laser center for supporting this article! We appreciate your dedication to inclusive beauty within the cosmetic industry, and we’re glad you’re here to fight the good fight with us on The Fem Word.
Makeup and skincare brands that promote inclusive beauty standards:
When Life Gives you Lemons
KULFI Beauty
Live Tinted
Hanahana Beauty
PRATIMA Skincare
ILIA Beauty
FENTY beauty
Juvia’s Place
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