The Brown-Skinned Beauty In A Sea of "White"-Obsessed Fools

Love yourself. How hard can it be?

Not quite easy in a country where conformity is the standard, especially when it asks you to conform to what nature has not given you: "white" skin. As a kid, I have always wondered why we are so obsessed with how fair our skin is, and throughout the years, found the apparent reasons of people who believe this idea quite absurd, with the same magnitude as the stupidity of the believer itself. Which is why finding people who can learn to appreciate their color is always a welcome surprise.



Meet Julienne, a kayumanggi beauty working in Hong Kong. She used to despise her skin's color because of the typical Filipino's notions on skin tone, but finally learned to love herself, thanks to her working abroad and finding people who actually loved her look.

It was family and friends that first conditioned Julienne into coveting that white skin, on the grounds that white skin suggests fair-skinned people seemed "mabango (good smelling / fresh)". I interviewed my mother-in-law, who did not want her granddaughter staying in the provinces and stay with the kid's other grandmother because she did not want the girl to become darker. I asked why she did not like dark skin and she told me, "hindi kasi mukhang malinis (it's because it looks dirty)". Everything starts at home, as I'd like to put it - and tanned skin, even if you were born with it, is monstrous.

It was a good thing Julienne was able to meet other people who looked at her skin in a different light. She finally learned to accept what nature had given her. But pity for those people stuck in this country, like that little girl who will be bent on avoiding the sun and spending a ton of cash on whitening products because her grandmother taught her the "standard" of keeping her skin as fair as it can be.

I've always believed that beauty has always been defined by our socio-economic biases. During the Victorian Era, European had to do a lot of crazy things just to lighten their complexion because white skin was the standard. Note that the nobles at that time had fairer skin while the common folk had darker shades from working under the sun. Now, Westerners prefer "tanned" skin as this signifies one is not a meager office/factory slave worker who never gets time to go outdoors.

In modern Philippines, the belief is more Victorian - fair skin is akin to one's riches, which is quite funny considering some of these riches are funneled out trying to "look" rich, to look whiter. Unfortunately, it is quite normal for Filipinos to have naturally golden skin - just like the little girl who in a few years may fall as a glutathione junkie. Which brings us the status of the skin care market - heavily packed with whitening products, cashing in on changing the Filipino's natural color into something straight out of a stupid, poorly written, badly casted, Filipino telenovela.

Just looking at the constant barrage of advertisement on whitening products is enough to paint the bleak futile future of skin care in the country. With too many whitening products in the market, it is quite alarming that the number of sunblock and sunscreen products are not as visible than their exfoliating/false-coloring counterparts, especially when lighter skin is tantamount to lesser sun protection, thus heightened risk for skin cancer.

Like Julienne, I am hopeful that Filipinos finally learn to love themselves, at least for the sake of their meager earnings and health. While it is true that a more open, rational paradigm shift on skin tone will take generations, we Filipinos should be practical and focus on more important matters, like actually becoming rich, than just looking like one. Let beauty be defined by you, not by media or society's wretched biases.