I like that idea– always important to look at things in the more nuanced way.

I don’t know what to think, though. I have a Vietnamese friend who lives here in the States and she’s always using whitening cream. Or she’ll stay inside all summer to avoid the sun. She was on the track team with me once and once winter ended she brought a gigantic UV blocker to cover her face (it looked like a mask and she had to hold it up off her face), and she quit long before the end of the spring. She’s obsessed with beauty. A girl brought up that this beauty practice was rooted in classism, and the girl responded, “I know that, but that’s not the point– it’s just different where I live,” which I agreed with. On one hand, it strikes me as a bad thing and bothers me somewhat, but who are we to say anything? Is it better to say or not say anything? I don’t know. It’s very complicated :/

Pls join the campaign: http://www.change.org/petitions/view/unilever_please_stop_marketing_racist_products

The truth is this: our colonial history has left us all with some absolutely atrocious ideals of beauty. But they exist, and they need to be dealt with in the appropriate manner.

Vaseline is, rather smartly actually, using social-media to activate an existing product, for an existing demographic that has an existing need. And that’s okay. We need to get out of our ethnocentric perspective to look at things from the demographics’ point of view: there is nothing wrong with marketing a skin-bleaching formulae to a market that utilizes it, on quite a regular basis actually. There is nothing unethical about what they are doing.

But the question is: how do we polish-off our archaic, colonial, systems of beauty? And can that be done through marketing.

On a last note creams like this one have been very very popular in the region.
Being the most famous one, “Concha Nacar” which is made out of sea shells.
I don’t know the chemical contents but it is probably abbrasive and not healthy.

Even in africa, lot of people (especially women) use tanand others products to make their skin more white…

(Hell, try convincing women in the US to stop wearing high heels because of the sordid history of those damn shoes; we know that they’re physically dreadful but we’ve also seen feminist moves to reclaim high heels ignoring the past.)

I’m not justifying the historical roots of these markers but I still find it deeply problematic to see a bunch of Americans telling Indians that they’re living out racist values in their desire for whitening products. We’ve got a lot of work to do on our own turf. And I also think that by holding on to our own racial histories, we fail to understand the caste narratives that shape a lot of Indian society. And the ways in which things like whitening have more to do with caste than anything else.

So if anything, I think that we should be complicating the stories we’re hearing and opening up space to listen to people whose experiences and struggles with these issues differ from our own.