Since moving to South East Asia I have witnessed first hand just how misconstrued Eastern and Western women’s versions of real beauty have become.

Walking around beauty stores and pharmacies I am amazed at the array of skin whitening products available to Asian women. Local TV ads zoom in on the faces of pure white Asian ladies while billboards and posters in mall and shop windows yell how white is right. It seems the obsession to be whiter than white has hit its limit.

It strikes me as ironic when you consider how many western men leave their home countries filled with whiter-than-white women to come to Thailand and be surrounded by the beautiful raven-haired exotic ladies living here. Yet Asian women continue to support the massive skin bleaching industry by purchasing everything from deodorant to night cream containing whitening agents.

You have to ask the question, what came first, the advertising or the demand? Every internationaladvertisement I have seen since living in the region uses very western-looking Asian actors and actresses. Yet the advertisers are appealing to the Asian community with cameras, fridges and cell phones using rather cosmopolitan representatives that are clearly not reflective of the general population. The same can be said for a Western society that uses stick thin Botox-pumped 18 year olds to advertise anti-wrinkle
cream.

Why is it that all western women lather themselves in tanning oil and bake in the sun, spend a fortune of fake tan, spray tan and risk cancer on sun beds, while Asian women spend a vast amount on every imaginable whitening and bleaching product on the market?

You have this odd parody of lobster pink and peeling sun-worshipping westerners alongside bleached easterners who do everything they can to shield their precious skin from the sun’s rays.

It is not uncommon to see a Thai lady on her scooter wearing a long-sleeved shirt and gloves all the while expertly maneuvering an umbrella over her head. On the flipside, our covered-up Thai lady is over-taken on the inside lane by a tomato-red British woman in her (too small) white bikini on her way back to the beach for another roasting session.

When tanned westerners return home from sunny vacation spots, their friends exclaim with jealously: “Wow, you are so brown!” Meanwhile her eastern counterpart says to a cousin she hasn’t seen in months “Wow, you are so nice and white!”

A Thai friend admitted that Thai ladies with pale skin are viewed as wealthy and successful. Whereas the rich and famous western celebrities lather themselves in faux tan to give the impression they have just returned from a vacation on a private yacht in the Caribbean.

When did our perception of beauty become so deranged? Thai women often go on about how wonderful and tall I am. I have always wanted to be 5ft 6in and a neat little package that fits into an economy aeroplane seat without my knees poking into my armpits and to be able to sit on a barstool in a skirt without showing more than my mother taught me.

I guess what I have realized is that, when it comes to beauty, women want what they don’t have. It is as simple as that. Our obsession with fruitlessly attempting to change our appearance funds a multi-billion dollar industry that can’t lose either way; bleached or
browned.