On a somewhat-related note: like I mentioned in my OP, I get really sick of the pressure us American women have to be tan. The explosion in tanning salons and tanning creams on the market is everywhere. I feel very sad when I see teens and younger women fake-bake themselves so that they look ridiculous, and are also in the process damaging their skin.
Let me give you two examples from my own life:
Here is a photo of me and my cousins. I am the pale one, on the left. Look at my cousin, the dark one in the middle… she is 20, and she always looks that dark, even in the winter. She is NOT that dark naturally. When she was younger, she was as pale as me. Why? Just why??
Same thing in this photo. This time, I am on the far right. Look at my friend in the middle - she is normally the same color as me. Of course my friend on the left is naturally dark, and gorgeous.
I am DONE with tanning and fake tanning creams. I am super pale and happy to stay that way, even though compared to many women my age, I look like a ghost.
That’s not what I said - I meant that Indians discriminate against each other based on their skin color. Any discrimination based on skin color or race is extremely objectionable to me.
I hear less about my skin colour from the average Westerner than I do the average Indian. That was my point.
I’m the product of a very fair mother and a dark man-I’m inbetween, as it happens. My boyfriend is very dark. We can just be hideous together (in the eyes of the average Indian), I guess.
I don’t know where you’re getting the racism towards Westerners from my post? There’s definitely an element of standoffishness where interracial relationships are concerned but that’s one sentiment that occurs amongst more traditional people universally and I don’t think Indians are particularly special about it.
Okay sorry-I re-read your sentence. It was kind of a runon but I get that you’re saying Americans get all the flak for being racist but there’s a ton of it in other cultures that traditionally complain about discrimination. Am I right?
It’s not exactly a foreign concept to us in the West, though; we do exactly the same thing to ugly people that Indians do to dark people (and ugly people).
Pale doesn’t even begin to cover it for me. I’m freaking Irish for godsake. I accuse my girlfriend of having “Tannorexia” all the time, no matter how toffee brown she gets she thinks she looks pale and needs to go tanning again.
I on the other hand make Depeche Mode look like surf bums. I’m often told that I’m not pale, I’m clear.
Yes I am clear too - you can see all my veins and even with freshly shaved legs, you can still see the dark hair underneath the skin, before it’s even made it to the surface. But that said, I’d rather be clear than be a fake-n-baker and have leather skin by the time I am 40!
You should tell your girlfriend to stop the skin abuse - she’s beautiful in her natural color!
Yes pretty much. Americans have traditionally had the reputation for being discriminatory against our fellow Americans because of their skin tone… but here we are seeing examples of this same type of discrimination being very prevalent in India, and not a lot of us (Westerners) are aware of this.
Also, it can similarly be compared to the discrimination that overweight people endure in the US too.
It still makes sense, though. I presume from its name that the Regenerist cream is intended to clear away dead skin cells and reveal your newer skin. Newer skin cells are lighter because they haven’t been exposed to the sun.
I don’t think that you’re that far out of the norm. It actually works in both directions. I’m Indian, but very light-skinned. I knew several Indian girls that weren’t comfortable with having boyfriends lighter than them. But at the end of the day, it’s all about preference. One girl that I had a crush on in college told a mutual friend that she couldn’t go out with someone who had the complexion of “dudh”. Dudh means milk. She was exaggerating significantly, but you get the point.
(Actually, I think the actual theory is interesting: IIRC, Krishna was originally a local deity of the southern (and darker) Dravidian people. His skin color indicates his origins, after having been incorporated into the pantheon of the northern Aryan (and lighter-skinned) invaders.)
I remember trying one of the lightening creams in India when I was there as a teenager. Result was my tan got a wee bit less golden and a bit more ashen.
Can you imagine the outcry in the US if they tried marketing these skin-whitening creams there? Hehehe. Would be good entertainment.
The television commercials for these creams are SO phony! It’s so obvious they’re using lighting and trick photography to show the dark-skinned girl being transformed into a white-skinned “beauty.” I don’t know how anyone can be fooled.
Hair-straightening was marketing to African-Americans as a method to make themselves “whiter” - Malcolm X specifically identified it as one of the things that disgusted him the most about what people tried to “sell” him as a youth.
I, too, am transparent. I spend daylight hours dashing from shade tree to shade tree and trying not to spontaneously combust, and I’ve always been that way. I’ve gotten rude comments on occasion (HOW can you wear a skirt with skin that pale? Um… I’m white, deal with it, m’kay?). All those girls over all those years trying to drag me out into the sun for “just a little color”… meaning “brown” but all I’d get was “red”. I’ve never visited a tanning booth, and never will.
Funny, though… I’m in my mid-40’s and frequently people take me for early 30’s. All those girls in high school who baked themselves? Prunes. Wrinkles all over. Look ten years older than they are. Worried to death about skin cancer.
Sad, very sad. Wish people could just be beautiful as themselves.
It’s exactly the same as what white Westerners do, only in reverse, and is nothing to do with race.
That is to say “what white Westerners did” before all the skin cancer scares.
If you live in a hot climate country with an agrarian economy, dark skin marks you as spending time out in the fields and therefore poor. If you live in a temperate climate industrialised country, a tan did (at least until the 70s and 80s) mean you had time to lie on a beach rather than be stuck in a cubicle office working for the Man, and therefore were possibly rich.
If it wasn’t for the skin cancer stuff, we in the West would still be guilty of the same thing.
There’s definitely an element of standoffishness where interracial relationships are concerned but that’s one sentiment that occurs amongst more traditional people universally and I don’t think Indians are particularly special about it.
