Pale is Beautiful
During the summer the beauty isle at a Western supermarket is chock full of tanning oil and spray tans -- guaranteed to give you a natural looking tan without streaking! There’s sunscreen too, for those prone to burning, but the tanning products are by far the more popular and varied. During the winter tan upkeep becomes a constant worry: tanning salons, spray tans, and Caribbean cruises are all the rage. People have been aware of the links between skin cancer and sunbathing since the 60’s, but that knowledge seems to have done little to change our love of tanned skin. In the West, tanned skin is beautiful skin.
What’s most striking, then, to a white woman in the beauty isle in China is the whitening cream. Everything, from body wash to body lotion promises to make your skin white and smooth and beautiful; there are even specialized facial creams that have no other purpose. During the summer, it seems like every woman in China carries an umbrella with UV protection wherever she goes. When Chinese women ride their bikes and can’t carry their umbrellas, they wear big floppy hats and long gauzy white sleeves (even in the height of summer!) to protect their skin. Faced with such a radically opposite standard of beauty, a white woman in China can’t help but ask: what gives?
The answer lies in a recent cultural shift in the West. If you look at portraits of the great kings and nobles of the past, they are almost all strikingly pale. But any modern Western magazine cover bears a picture of a movie star with a dark, rich, even tan. What changed?
For millennia the wealthy and the noble in both the West and China valued pale skin because it was a sign that a person could stay indoors all day, meaning he or she didn’t have to work for a living. Laborers had to work in the fields; they had no choice but to get a deep tan. Pale skin was therefore a sign of wealth, and it became the standard of beauty as well. Women from the Romans to Japanese geishas, to 18th century French nobles, wore thick, white, lead based makeup to give themselves the appearance of perfect and perfectly pale complexions.
However, during the twentieth century, something changed in the West. Those who weren’t laborers could afford vacations, and places with lots of sun became popular destinations, particularly the French Riviera. Sun tanning started to become popular, again because it symbolized wealth: the ability to go someplace sunny for a couple of weeks and lounge on the beach basking in the sun for hours at a time. When fashion template Coco Channel got a deep tan during her vacation to the French Riviera in the 1920’s the emerging fashion really took hold (1). That fashion has stuck around for 80 years, and it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon, skin cancer or no skin cancer.
In China, there has been no such parallel culture shift. Modern Chinese people continue to value pale skin as a sign of wealth and beauty just as they always have, and the standard doesn’t appear to be going anywhere any time soon, beach vacations or no beach vacations.
