The video that I linked a couple of posts ago, that looks at the horrible messages we get from the beauty industry and media, does not really address racism, which is also tied into the whole thing. When I think about my own experience with, and attemtps to resist, the brainwash, race (a problematic word) is the first thing that comes to mind. At some point in my teens, I realized that my image of beauty was totally European. It had been shaped by my reading mostly, I thought, English and American writers (golden curls, pink cheeks, oh the pink cheeks, how I had wished that my skin was light enought to show when I blushed). I didn't like that I could not see the beauty in other races the same way I could in caucasian faces. So I decided I had to educate my eye and I did that by just looking different kinds of faces. National geographics was a good source. And gradually my eye learned, I cannot say completely, but enough to give me the experience of seeing beauty where I had not seen it before. Beauty that was as clear and compelling as any other I had experienced.
The pictures in Lillian's baby books are mostly caucasian, with a few exceptions. So we've made a little album of more ethnically diverse babies. But then I realized that though I've included babies and mamas, I didn't include dads, so we're going to expand the selection.
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I'm not sure if you've ever heard of the product Fair & Lovely, but it's definitely relevant to this discussion to the confluence of race, beauty, and media influence.
Here are a few commercials:
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You'll probably want to kill after watching these. I was shocked at how brazen the message was.
Grrrr! What an unspeakable insult to anyone's intelligence. I've seen the product in shops in Malaysia. The funny thing was that there were also fake tan in a bottle in the same shops.
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