A Whiter Shade of Pale
Whiteness Tradition
But mere creams or makeup is child’s play. Ever heard that beauty comes from within? So, what could be better than ingesting something that will make you pale and beautiful.
Some of these recipes date back hundreds of years. There are sources from the Ming Dynasty that talk about the famed “three white soup”. It is made from white peony root, white trachylids, white tuckahoe, and licorice. The resulting potion probably made one´s skin whiter. But at what cost?
Apart from grinding up pearls and swallowing the powder foods, such as walnuts, peas, lily root, soybean milk, almonds, pearl barley, asparagus, white fungus, and white turnips have also been recommended for your average skin color ailment.
Enter the big guns
All the above could still be counted as harmless and even natural treatment. And as always these things might work, or not but mostly they will not harm you, or at least not too much.
Yet, there are two highly efficient and probably damaging types of whitening regimens: Suppressing melanin production in the body. And scraping off dead skin cells and thus revealing the lighter layer beneath.
Chinese medicine is highly sophisticated and early on it developed ways to suppress melanin production by applying creams and ingesting certain herbs and minerals. The side effects seem to be worth the result for many women. There are still enough eager customers that will go the extra mile.
Enter mercury! Don´t be shocked. Everyone did it. Ancient Egyptians, Romans and upper-class Western ladies applied mercury and arsenic creams to their faces. Hoping to get beautiful while killing themselves.
But it is not a thing of the past. These days amounts of heavy metals, that would have already freaked out even the most non-organic Westerner, will not stop Chinese ladies. After all you want results, don´t you. And mercury will definitely provide those results.
Well, for some time that is. After that, if applied in large enough amounts, it will accumulate in the skin and give you a darker complexion. How ironic!
Another method is akin to peeling. But if you think that Asian women are simply buying epilating shower gel and then scrub their skin until they look like a lobster, you would be wrong again.
Being beautiful has its cost. So, they use laser treatment, cryo-therapy, and chemicals to remove the upper layer of skin that retains the melanin. And behold, below this nasty useless layer of skin (see, nature has no idea how to create a perfect being!), comes forth a radiating beauty.
Why judge?
Most in the West might shake their heads in disbelief. Yet, what seems absurd to our cultural norms, is normal here. And who am I to judge. If it doesn´t hurt me, yet makes others happy, why should anyone care? After all, many Western attitudes seem funny or shocking to Asians as well.
No one can force someone else to accept their beauty standards. Nor should they. You find white skin ugly? Another finds dark skin ugly. If this attitude has no repercussions in human interaction, why should someone else´s opinion be a problem?