Posted on 05/14/2006 5:21:42 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
Glamour at a price in Asia By Thomas Fuller International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, MAY 2, 2006
MAKHAM KHU, Thailand Neighbors gawk and children yell, "ghost!" The manager of the restaurant where Panya Boonchun worked simply told her she was fired.
The cream that she applied to her face and neck was supposed to transform her into a white-skinned beauty, the kind she saw on page after page in women's magazines and on television.
But rather than lighten her complexion, the illegally produced lotion she bought in a local grocery store near this village in southeastern Thailand disfigured her skin into an unsightly patchwork of albino pink and dark brown, a condition that doctors say might be irreversible.
At a time when whiter skin is being aggressively marketed across Asia as beautiful and healthy, Panya's case illustrates the lengths that some women will go to change their complexions - and the dangers that this sometimes entails.
The vast selections of skin-whitening creams on supermarket and pharmacy shelves are testament to an industry that has flourished over the past decade, with 4 out of 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan now using a skin-whitening cream, a survey conducted by Synovate, a market research company, found.
The skin-whitening craze, which runs parallel to the global trend of cosmetic surgery and botox injections, is not just for the face. It includes creams that whiten darker patches of skin in armpits and "pink nipple" lotions that bleach away brown-colored pigment.
Women buy sunscreen creams to wear to the office in case they are struck by stray rays while commuting, the modern equivalent of the huge parasols that servants once carried to shield their masters from the intense Asian sun.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Michael Jackson ping.
Kristin Laura Kreuk (born December 30, 1982) is a Canadian-born actress and model of Dutch and Indonesian Chinese descent...
Im glad Im a white guy I wont have to use this stuff if it becomes the "in" thing. MJ lives on in asia! LOL!
Guess it's true what they say....once you've tried piebald, there's no going back.
This will spread as america's population ages and the desire for young skin takes hold in the older health concious crowd.
Saw it coming.
What a shame. Skin color is not a hindrance to beauty. On the contrary. Women of all races have beauty in their unique ways, and skin color is an integral part of that beauty.
The boob job craze in Japan and China is another example of these fads ruining the natural beauty of Asian women.
With billions of money at stake, I do not see it going away soon. They are all pushed by those women who claim to know what ticks women. When it comes to this matter, women are a hopeless herd, a dream market for sellers.
It's so ironic when I think of the USA gals who spend time in the sun to get more tan. I know a few today who probably wish that thye had not spent so much time in the sun back in the 1970s and 1980s. Now their skin looks much more old and dry. Too bad cuz they had nice facial features, so they were cute at that time.
liver spots are going to be a big issue in the comming decades.
Worse, some does it inside a tanning machine, which looks like a coffin covered with ultraviolet light tubes.
Do it naturally or not, it is a bad thing as you said. They should have kept it. Other women across the pacific ocean would literally kill to have such skin.
Unending business opportunity.:)
I am afraid that, in a few short years, all Asian women would look dead-white, whiter than Caucasians, and more like ghosts or vampires.:)
I know. Now they are going to push it to ridiculous extreme.
I remember about 10 years ago the fad in Japan was for super deep tans and that many of the girls that had them looked like absolute freaks. I was glad to see that one go out of style.
You will see the exact opposite now. They are no less freaks, though.:)
And as in the dark all cats are gray,
Benjamin Franklin
Yup. Today's modern gal is paying for it when she goes to the hair dresser for loose ends, to the pedicurist for broken nails, and the cosmetologist to get her latest lesions excised.
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