What is white?
As a woman, I have seen countless people who want to be pretty and fair. Most of them indulge into beauty products that make them white and fair. The cost of this vanity would range from a couple of hundreds to thousands of pesos, add to that the maintaining cost that one has to pay for every month.
Over time, men has also diverged into the world of vanity. If you look into social media portals, men post selfies with their face free of freckles and pimples. Others even lift their shirts to show their six-pack abs, if there are any.
With this society that we live in, the world looks Westward. The west has a lot of notions that destroys our identity. According to a professor, the boxer codex, written by Pedro Chirino, documents that our forefathers had a different standard of beauty. Beautiful women then had flat foreheads and noses. Their skins were brown with teeth that sparked red from the buyo nut that they chewed day in and day out. It was only when the Spanish came when this notion changed. Filipinos saw that the Spaniards had power. Immediately they thought that white skin was equated to power. From there, the history of us liking to be white was born.
If you get a chance to visit department stores and cosmetic centers, they sell whitening products. I once had a hard picking out a non-whitening lotion when my best friend from Canada was in the country because she simply didn't want to be white, she wanted to be tan – the beautiful color if you came from a developed country.
That's how topsy-turvy the world gets when it comes to the notion of beauty. While it is relative, pop culture continues to feed the standard of beauty as somebody who is fair with long sleek hair. What others do not see is the person beyond the skin and the pretty face. However, how come beauty queens that win pageants are those with tanned skin? Then what really is the standard of beauty?
It's a messed up culture if you ask me. We do not know who we are. People from the other side of the world praise us for our skin color while we strive to strip it off our skin so badly. The beauty industry is full of facades and unseen objects that try to conceal what we don't want from ourselves. It has become so easy to be a different person with the business that they are running.
According to a dermatologist, engaging in whitening products may be harmful especially when used in extreme conditions. Injectables may lead to skin cancer and even death when used wrongly. She further added that whitening products becomes dangerous if it is already a lifestyle where a man or a woman has become obsessed with the goal of becoming white.
If you are to ask me, I don't care what is white. It is just a skin color, nothing special and nothing fancy. Color does not speak for the person nor the heart or anything within. How I long for the day that there would be no stereotypes of dark people and others that come with the judgment. If we want equality then we must not look at the outward appearance but the soul that speaks a thousand words.
If you ask me again what is white? I'd shrug and say again, it's just a color. A color that gives the wrong impression of beauty and I could only wish that we could strip that off the mindset of every Filipino.
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