White
Beauty
When it
comes to beauty and fashion, you would think that the colour of the skin
doesn’t matter. That where you are from, where you were born wouldn’t affect
the way you’re portrayed in the media and that beautiful is just beautiful
right? Wrong. Unfortunately, in todays media, colour of skin matters, the
colour of your skin ‘decides’ whether you are considered beautiful or not.
After
talking to few friends from Asia (Thailand, Philippines and China), I
have found out that dark skinned people are look down upon in media – TV,
fashion and movie stars. Media in those countries 'love the whiteness’, it is
considered that the whiter your skin, the better. People of dark skin are
looked down upon and considered dirty and poor. People in media go as far as
whitening their skin and doing surgery to look more ‘white’. The idea of making
yourself white to be more ‘beautiful’ is very extreme and it is not right. Skin
colour should not affect the way you’re being looked at. In a perfect media
world, each skin colour would be treated as beautiful, without any exceptions
or forcing into change.
Last year
the Cosmopolitan magazine has used white models to describe ‘gorgeous’ trends
and black models to show ‘dying’ trends. They named 21 trends that were
‘gorgeous’, every single one was of a white model. All the white models had
‘Hello, Gorgeous’ written on top, while the black models with the acronym
‘R.I.P.’ written above. This situation has led to a lot of hate talk towards the ‘racist magazine’ especially on
social media.
Twitter posts:
“Really??? @Cosmopolitan What are you trying to
imply ...#Tasteless #ThinkbeforeYouPost #Unfollowing”
@princesssaurus
“@Cosmopolitan so racist. whoever
made this & allowed it to be posted should be fired. you should be
embarrassed & ashamed of yourselves!”
@9lines2cross
Seriously @Cosmopolitan - how many editing sessions did you go through
& still not consider #racist trend guide!?!#beautyconfidential
The world
isn’t fair for all races, the media especially. The big issues in media is how they show one
race being better than the other, it is distasteful and wrong. Unfortunately, everything that we were thought from birth about equal
rights and that
everyone deserves the same chance, goes out the window with the mediated world we
have today.
This is super interesting! And when you think about it, there are so many instances where this has happened, too many come to mind. But if they do showcase other races and cultures, you can often see that it's to get that element of diversity, maybe because there has been some backlash or something like that, rather than just because, actually, these women/men of many races and cultures are beautiful too.
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