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Per Jill

piny

I saw this article in the LA Times a while ago, about an emerging whitening-product trend in my state. Here’s a link from Prometheus 6:

Take a daylight drive through Asian immigrant enclaves like Monterey Park and Irvine, and you’ll see women trying to shield themselves with umbrellas — even for the short dash from a parking lot into a supermarket. While driving, many wear special “UV gloves” — which look like the long gloves worn with ball gowns — to protect their forearms, and don wraparound visors that resemble welder’s masks.

At beauty salons, women huddle around cosmetics counters asking about the latest cleansers and lotions that claim to control melanin production in skin cells, often dropping more than $100 for a set. Beauticians do a brisk business with $65 whitening therapies. Women dab faces with fruit acid, which is supposed to remove the old skin cells that dull the skin, and glop on masks with pearl powder or other ingredients that they believe lighten the skin.

There are doctors who, for about $1,000, will use an electrical field to deliver vitamins, moisturizers and bleaching agents to a woman’s face in a procedure known as a “mesofacial.”

There was an article about skin-bleaching/whitening products from several months ago that talked about intranational marketing strategies. Google has failed me. I’ll keep looking.

11 thoughts on Per Jill

  1. Read the Indian matrimonial ads too – requests are often for fair or wheaten complexioned young ladies…. oh, and preferably with green cards

  6. Not that I doubt that this is happening, but as someone who lives in Irvine, I can tell you that I’ve never seen a young Asian-American woman walking around with UV gloves or an umbrella on a sunny day. I’ve seen elderly folks of all races walking around with umbrellas everyday, but I think that has more to do with heat than skin color. Maybe it’s because I spend most of my time on-campus, around students who don’t have the cash required for such treatments–but then again, the students here are mostly local and set financially, so you’d think they’d be the target audience. So while the trend may be real, I haven’t seen evidence of it in the one of the two areas identified as its epicenter.

  7. I’ve seen a few redheads with pale skin who carry umbrellas and wear gloves (not the special ones, though) or long sleeves here in Oklahoma even in the hottest months. I think that’s understandable though; skin cancer is nothing to mess around with.

  8. Tanned skin… bleached skin… what the hell? Either way, they’ll end up looking like a beat up catcher’s mitt… That’s so hot!

  9. This is a huge issue in the Middle East and South Asia. I am white so I hate to bring it up and have found no way to do so gracefully. I wish some ladies of color would discuss how profoundly wrong it is, and how beautiful dark skin is, and boycott it, or something. One of these products, “Fair and Lovely,” is the biggest selling cosmetic in Egypt.

    Sun protection is another issue. Bleaching creams actually do something permanent to the skin, apparently (there was that long article from a Desi magazine that was brought up on Feminist the last time you guys discussed this issue, that explained the pharmacology of it). SPFs just protect skin from UV rays. And that is something people of all skin tones should do to avoid skin cancer.

    Another disturbing thing here in Egypt is that Egyptians often use the word “pretty” to mean “white skinned.” e.g., I was wondering out loud how Egyptians can ask me where stuff is when I so obviously don’t look Egyptian becuase i am so caucasian looking and the Egyptian woman I was with (who was pretty light skinned) said “Oh, but we have lots of pretty people in Egypt!” and she said this without thinking twice. Pretty = white, and dark people are often said to be ugly.

    Again, I hesitate to discuss this issue because it sounds weird coming from an extremely pale white non-Egyptian, but it is really troubling.

  10. South Africa banned skin-whitening creams and applications years ago because of the terrible effets they were having on people.

  11. I used to live in both Japan and Thailand. All of this is was extremely common in both places- the umbrellas, the gloves (these more so in Japan), the white lotions. Some of the lotions have something in them to make you simply look paler, some have ingredients to bleach the skin. There was even deoderant in Thailand with white in it to conteract hyperpigmented armpits. In Japan, people would often ridicule Southeast Asians for being darker. It was derogatory in Japan to say someone looked Thai for this reason.

    I am very fair and an old man in a noodle restaurant waxed poetic about me for a good 5 minutes at least.

    The whole topic was something me and my local friends discussed alot.

    I would find it hard to believe people living in the States would take to it so much though. I never knew anyone hurt by these products though.

    Just some info.

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