An unidentified Bangkok shopper looks on while seated near an advertisement for skin lightening products. Pic: AP.
By James Austin
The whitening phenomenon in Thailand, i.e. the use of cosmetic products to whiten the skin – and now we can include beauty apps that might obviate the use of whitening products, for the online face at least – often seems to beguile the visitor from the West, or at least cause them to smirk at outlandish items such as underarm whitening deodorant. But before we smirk, we might look at our own seemingly strange habits.
A commenter on a BuzzFeed post showing the magic of the much cherished Beauty Plus app (‘Top 1 Photo app in Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Taiwan!’ according to itself) wrote: “So sad that white girls want this ‘tanning filter’ and non-white people are still trying to look pale…I don’t get it.” In answer to her not getting it some co-commenters expressed that we, the consumers, under the duress of the producers and their side-kick marketeers, will always be sold what we don’t have. In parts of the grey West: tans, and in hotter climates: pale skin. But perhaps more broadly, we are all sold one thing we don’t have enough of: status.
The tan, or pallour, is proof of status, or enough money to accrue leisure hours. Whether there’s an intrinsic beauty to skin colour is not for me to say, but our choices concerning beauty and fashion to some degree have probably been advanced to us by our environment.
People weren’t always keen on being brown(er) in Western Europe. Prior to the industrial revolution, when the serfs did their hard labour outside in the highly unpredictable (but predictable enough if you were out every day of your life from childhood to often an early death) English sun, being tanned was seen as a rather symbolically scummy ailment. That’s part of the reason why the upper classes from the 16th to 19th centuries risked their lives using whitening treatments, just as some English folks risk skin cancer from tanning on Thai beaches and in Birkenhead tanning salons in the present (cases of malignant melanoma in the UK have shot up over the last 30 years).
Ladies and gents of the esteemed class, before farms gave way to factories as a means of mass production, would go to great lengths to look as though they lived otiose lives, piling ceruse (white lead powder) on their faces; something that if it didn’t kill them, it certainly made them weaker; or applying the highly toxic and sometimes deadly compounds of mercury chloride and mercury sulphide to increase pallour and rouge, respectively (mercury is found in banned whitening products in Thailand and other countries today). According to Bill Bryson’s book ‘At Home: A short History of Private Life’, English women, and men, in their quest not to look like the savage masses in the 19th century would even drink diluted arsenic, as well as wear clothes that damaged their internal organs and giant hairdos that might contain a cornucopia of burrowing creepy crawlies. Bryson writes that the one thing that pushed styles and fashions into obscurity was when the working class copied the rich; at that point the rich abandoned their big hair and sartorial masochism. Pale skin, however, took centuries to go out of fashion. Tanned skin, popularized by bronze babes on exotic beaches, became the must have skin in the early 20th century.
So we might not feel so surprised when we see vast lines of whitening products on the shelves of Thai pharmacies and appearing on the scrolls of Facebook pages. ‘White power’ may have lost some of its sheen in the West, but in Thailand and beyond it is still in its heyday. This has caused some amount of controversy, mostly concerning more nefarious products containing known poisons that have at times seared the skin from unsuspecting women’s faces, but also because of the arrantly unfashionable way some Thai skin products companies have advertised their pseudo-magic formulas. These range from face whitening to vagina bleaching. In one such ad, probably the most insulting of a very bad bunch, Verena L-Gluta Berry Plus advertises its so-called beauty drink by showing an unhappy black bear speaking to a pale-skinned female doctor who explains to the bear that it took millions of years for its kind to evolve into a white bear. Fortunately, she tells the sad bear, with the use of beauty drinks evolution can happen overnight. Proof of this is her father’s appearance in the office; he has dark skin, and is actually Negroid. Needless to say the ad proved to be lusterless among some of the critical Thai population, but that didn’t prevent many more ill-thought out ads containing ridiculous prejudicial notions following it. The advertising, which often shamelessly exploits people’s (mostly women) insecurities, are part of a growing trend. Global research says the skin whitening industry in Asia-Pacific and the Middle East is booming, and may be worth an estimated $23 billion by 2020.
When I asked groups of upper high school students in Chiang Mai why they thought that whitening treatment was so prevalent in Thailand they didn’t correlate the phenomenon with money or status, rather they told me because it was just beautiful, or “not dirty”. Only one student said it might be linked to Thailand’s mimicking of Japanese and Korean fashion trends; trends that depict eternally happy pale faces perpetually in love with life. The girl (actually born in Korea) who said this had a good point, and was well aware of the artificiality propping it up, something Thai writer and feminist Kaewmala wrote about in a 2012 on the Thai beauty issue. That Thai girls (including, ironically, Korean girls) are going to extraordinary lengths: adding lotions, donning masks, fixing noses, sharpening chins, trimming lips and filling in mouths, to look like the ideal version of a Korean ‘pretty’ girl. As most people in Thailand have tanned skin, and other looks that might be said to be aligned with their geographical gene pool, might have caused some amount of psychological despair, despair that can perhaps be managed with expensive cosmetics or apps that plunder personal information. For much of the Thai population their face just isn’t in, while at the same time social media and the age of the selfie has put everyone’s face on the map.
In a story on Thailand’s selfie obsession, which focuses on the selfie as narcissism in the negative, but also as a kind of self-assertion of a lost identity in the positive, Kaewmala says that the selfie obsession could be a result of, “the exterior self and want to be in control [due to] sensitivity about self-image,” adding that among most Thais, the “interior self as individuals and society has been badly neglected.” Perhaps the preponderance of beauty treatments and their near-by-hand apps is ironically technological development leading to a less developed place in time. Less awareness, consequentially, leaves more people open to exploitation.
Image via ThaiZoom.com
Dr. Wayne Deakin, writer of the paper Occidentalism and Cultural Commodity Fetishism, who is currently writing a book on Hegel, Marx and the Thai State, explained to me what he thought of ‘white power’ in Thailand:
The Thai discourse of whitening fashion is a displaced form of colonialism, colonialism at a strange précis, as opposed to imperialism or hegemony, where there are gains for foreign powers. Here, a colonial discourse of white privilege has been in effect internalized – the sense of class, privilege and creed exhibited by colonial powers. As Derrida once put it, a ‘white mythology.’ Thais have themselves absorbed this into their culture.
The privileged class is white, just as they were in Victorian England. But, white is rarely construed just as privilege, as a tan isn’t. We equate it with innate beauty, or style, which is much harder to criticize, because we think it is not some form of environmental manipulation. Rather, it’s a kind of fortunate birthright. Deakin explains, invoking the philosophy of Roland Barthes, how this has come to be.
In Marxist arms this is a form of commodity fetishism, where something has been appropriated as natural, however the true process behind this discourse is hidden, or mystified. The white signifier (symbol) acts as what structuralists call a second-order signifier – it takes on a second meaning which is more than cleanliness or virginal – it signifies not working in the fields but in a government or administrative post, a class signifier and a signifier of colonial power internalised by the modern Thai self-discourse.
Do whitening products actually work?
In an article I wrote back in 2007 when I first thought about the reasons for this phenomenon, Suthiwa Viboonsunti, a pharmacist at the Chiang Mai Public Health Office for consumer protection, told me this: “Creams cannot make a dark skinned person white, they can only really prevent you from getting darker if they contain UV protection.” She went on to say that while many of the products on the black market were dangerous, products approved by Thailand’s food and Drug Administration (FDA) were not harmful. She also stated that mercury and hydroquinone, both banned toxins found in whitening products, still often end up on vendors’ stalls. These days we might replace stall with Facebook page. I wrote in the same story, “It is estimated that mercury-based ingredients or hydroquinone sell for about 800 baht a kilo.”
Palangpon Kongsaeree, Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry at Mahidol University told Asian Correspondent that the Ministry of Public Health (MOPH) in Thailand has estimated that around 20% of all whitening products contain dangerous toxins. Although he added that, “Personally, this figure is underestimated as the preliminary screening is not very effective.”
The reason, he says, that dangerous chemicals are used is because, unfortunately, nothing else works. The approved products, ones that have passed rigorous testing, don’t do what they say on the tin, so to speak. He tells me that, “Non-dangerous products like those counter brands are not effective and, if any, would take a lot longer time to see the whitening effect.”
Hazardous chemicals find their way past the testing procedure because everything else, according to Palangpon, is ineffectual. He developed a testing kit for harmful chemicals after he says that he found the MOPH’s testing procedure was not conclusive and gave, “a lot of false negative results”. He adds that, “This is abused by those cosmetics industries that put a lot of mercury, etc. in the products… Well, lots of money is out there.”
The short term effects of using creams or lotions containing mercury he says can result in serious facial skin problems, although he says that, “We are more concerned about the long term effect to internal organs like kidneys that will affect directly the country’s limited clinical treatment budget.” Of long term negative effects he says that consumers pay little attention, just as the English did when scores of the upper classes ended up dying or suffering serious internal injuries.
You might think that using the imperative ‘need’ in the title is hyperbolic, but notwithstanding the biological hazards some of these treatments may cause, it’s the psychological damage, prejudice, and even monetary implications that are of greater concern. In this white-obsessed nation not being low class, or being seemingly civilized (the need to be siwilai, as some scholars write), has often been attached to looking the right way: white. Comedic memes used to depict idiocy in Thailand often show a dark skinned, snub-nosed rural looking type with bad dental care. Similar misdirections and unsocial behavior appear in the West with ‘chav’ or ‘white trash’ memes, but in Thailand if you bring up the subject of skin colour in any school classroom you sense a palpable fear among most of the students. The force is strong. At a time when the country is already fractured between the so-called educated class the mostly rural class, the skin whitening business has a very dark underside. The beauty aspect of it all is verily skin deep, and so just as I did the other day, Thai teachers might want to ask their students what it actually means. After explaining to students much of what I have written in this article, the topic of skin colour didn’t seem as threatening. Some students seemed quite elevated by the fact they weren’t the first citizens of a country to damage their bodies to receive approval.
About the author:
James Austin is a journalist and fiction writer living in Thailand.