But the important thing about the awful skin-lightening product advertisement is not that it was made, but that the massive public outcry forced it off the air
last week, a Thai cosmetics company called Seoul Secret launched a new beauty product, Snowz, and got locally famous Thai actress Cris Horwang to appear in the promotional video. She starts out white, and explains: “In my world there is tough competition. If I don't take care of myself, everything I have built, the whiteness I have invested in, could be gone.”
Then her skin gradually darkens until she resembles one of those “blackface” comedians in early 20th century America. She looks down at herself in dismay, then at another Thai beauty, very white indeed, who magically appears beside her. “If I was white, I would win,” Ms Horwang says to herself.
But salvation is at hand: Her young rival generously points to a package of Snowz that magically appears between them. Ms Horwang brightens up, and so does her skin. The ad ends with her smiling again and saying: “Eternally white, I'm confident.” After an eruption of protests, the ad was withdrawn with “heartfelt apologies” from Seoul Secret. But they didn't withdraw the product.
They would have been crazy to take it off the market, because Asian women spend $13 billion a year on skin-whitening products. Africa is even more extreme, with 35 per cent of South African women using skin-whitening creams, and an astonishing 75 per cent of Nigerian women.
Several hundred million women are using these products regularly, despite a range of possible side-effects that run from ochronosis (which causes the skin to turn a dark purple shade) to leukemia, diabetes and cancers of the liver and kidneys. But whyIJ What's wrong with dark skinIJ
Nothing, obviously. Originally, several million years ago, all our ancestors were “white”, but they weren't actually human yet. They had pale skin, like most animals with fur, because the fur blocked most of the incoming sunlight, and pale skin is six times more efficient in turning the ultraviolet light from the sun into the vitamin D that they all need.
When modern humans evolved, they lost their fur — and since they evolved in equatorial Africa, where there is an abundance of sunlight, their bare skin was actually getting too much UV. So early humans developed dark skin to cut down on their UV intake, and early humans were all “black”. Then some of them migrated out of Africa and colonised the rest of the planet, including the parts in the high latitudes where there is much less UV in the sunlight.
The ones who ended up in northern Eurasia went back to having pale skin — Europeans in the West, North Asians in the northeast — in order to make better use of the limited UV that was available. And that's the end of the story: We ended up with the skin colour that suited where we lived.
So why the prejudice against dark skinIJ It's all about history, but it's much older than the European conquest of the world in 1500-1900. That left particularly deep psychological scars, but light-skinned people from the north have been conquering dark-skinned people further south for thousands of years.
The reasons are too complex to go into here, but it had nothing to do with skin colour. (See Jared Diamond's classic book Guns, Germs and Steel for a plausible explanation.) Nevertheless, dark-skinned people have been the historical losers for thousands of years, and people tend to blame themselves for losing. But this prejudice really is on the way out at last. The most important thing about that awful advertisement is not the fact that it was made. It's the fact that the outcry in Thailand forced it off the air.