Great story in today's Los Angeles Times about Asian-Americans (usually first generation immigrants) and their use of skin lightening products.
There are so many things at work here: an ancient idea that says that women with very pale skin are not laborers; that those with darker skin have native blood, and that those who are dark are low-class.
The story does not identify the women by their specific ethnicities, but among Filipinos, you can definitely see the prejudice through the lens of pop culture: every movie star or pop singer in the Philippines is light-skinned.
On the beauty side of the coin, this makes me laugh about the lengths that some women will go to. One woman dons a huge visor that covers her face and gloves that cover her forearms in order to not get more sun while driving. One woman spends a few hundred dollars a month to have a treatment she believes will interfere with the melanin production in her skin.
Fascination with skin color confounds me. I think as the generations go on, there will be far less of this, mostly because the white American ideal is to have tanned skin. Almost everyone quoted in the story is first generation. (For clarification, first generation is the first generation to immigrate, not the first native-born generation.)
Edit: Since reading this story, I have noticed several Asian women with the "welding helmet" thing on. What a world.
