This post is republished with permission from the Howard J Ross On Being Human Substack.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others. — W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

One white covers three ugliness. — Chinese proverb

We arrived in Bangkok at 5 AM after 26 hours of travel. It was not our first time in the country; in fact, back in 2018, we stayed there for a month. After retrieving our bags, we grabbed a cab and headed out to our hotel. As we drove, the billboards started to appear, one after another, and I began to notice something that I had seen before, but I could not stop seeing.

The faces looking down at me from the billboards (the picture above is an actual photograph from one week ago) were white. Not “fair.” Not “light.” A luminous, almost porcelain white that I rarely saw on the actual people walking beneath them. The actresses glowed. The pop stars glowed. Even the young men selling energy drinks glowed. And the advertisements promoted creams, serums, soaps, and even pills that promised to help ordinary Thais close the distance between the faces they had and the faces on the walls.

Thailand is neither the first nor only place I have seen this, nor only on billboards. In Mexico, I have repeatedly observed people commenting “¡Qué güerita!” (“What a fair little baby!”), in Cambodia, in Malaysia, in Singapore, similar advertisements. The same pattern was present in virtually every non-dominantly Caucasian country in which I have ever been.

I have spent more than fifty years working on questions of bias and belonging, and I can’t say that I was surprised, but every time I see this, it unsettles me. Why would people in a country of beautiful brown and golden complexions spend so much time, money, and sometimes their health, trying to look like someone else?

And, perhaps more to the point, who taught them to want that?

The Numbers Behind the Glow

What I noticed was not just in my imagination. Years ago, a Procter & Gamble brand manager in Bangkok estimated that whitening lotions made up roughly 60 percent of Thailand’s facial skincare market. A regional survey by the research firm Synovate found that 58 percent of Thai women between 18 and 64 in middle-income households were using a whitening product. Thailand was not alone: the same survey found about half of Filipino women, 45 percent of women in Hong Kong, and 41 percent of Malaysian women doing the same.

And, as I noted above, this is not only an Asian story. Consider what the World Health Organization and subsequent researchers have found re women regularly using skin-lightening products:

Nigeria, 77%; India, 61%; Togo, 59%; China, 40%; South Africa, 35%

A meta-analysis cited by the WHO’s Africa office put the lifetime prevalence of skin bleaching across the continent at about 27 percent. Globally, the industry was worth roughly $4.8 billion in 2017 and was projected to nearly double within a decade; and, sure enough, some market analysts now place it above $11 billion.

Those numbers carry a human cost. Many of these products, particularly the cheaper and unregulated ones, contain mercury, hydroquinone, or steroids. When Texas health officials tested one face cream, they found mercury at up to 131,000 times the allowable level. Women (and sometimes men) are, quite literally, poisoning themselves to be seen as beautiful.

Why?

A Story Older Than Empire

Here is where I want to be careful, because the easy answer is not the whole answer.

It would be tempting to lay all of this at the feet of European colonialism. But Thailand is the one country in Southeast Asia that was never colonized by a Western power, and Thais are rightly proud of that fact. The preference for pale skin there, as in China and Japan, long predates any European arrival. In an agrarian society, the logic was simple: dark skin meant you worked in the rice fields; pale skin meant you didn’t have to. The Japanese have an old saying that white skin hides seven flaws. Europeans, for their part, spent centuries chasing the same look. Queen Elizabeth I famously painted her face with lead.

Then something interesting happened. In the early twentieth century, as Western workers moved indoors into factories and offices, the symbolism flipped. A suntan became the mark of someone with the leisure to vacation in the sun, and Coco Chanel helped make it fashionable. Today, many white Westerners pay to darken their skin, or sit under tanning lamps that can, at times, make them look bizarrely orange, while many Asians pay to lighten theirs. Both, in a sense, are chasing the same thing: the look of not having to labor for a living.

So is this about race at all, or only about class?

I think the honest answer is: both, layered on top of each other. A Chulalongkorn University study traced Thai ideals of skin through three eras. First, a royal ideal of golden, “moon-colored” skin; then, after 1932, a whiter ideal shaped by Western influence; and now a pinkish, glassy whiteness modeled on Korean pop culture and spread by advertising. The historian David Streckfuss has shown how, between 1890 and 1910, Siam’s elites absorbed European racial categories as part of proving the kingdom “civilized” enough to stay independent. Never colonized, it turns out, is not the same as untouched by colonialism’s ideas.

Colonialism did not invent the preference for light skin. What it did was take an old class hierarchy, fuse it to a racial hierarchy with white Europeans at the top, and broadcast that message around the world through trade, missionaries, movies, and magazines. And as with so many forms of “us vs. them,” the hierarchy then turned inward. In Thailand, the people of Isan, roughly a third of the population, many of them darker-skinned, still contend with stereotypes that they are poor, uneducated, or less than.

What the Mind Learns Before It Can Choose

Those of us who study bias have a name for what happens when people absorb a dominant culture’s judgments about their own worth: internalized oppression.

In the 1940s, the psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark famously offered Black American children a choice between a white doll and a brown doll. Most chose the white doll as the “nice” one and the brown doll as the “bad” one. The work was cited by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education. (I always think it is important to note the irony that this landmark race relations study has been most often attributed to Kenneth, although Mamie was the chief designer and implementer…sexism lives on!). Frantz Fanon, writing from the French colonial Caribbean, described colonized people coming to see themselves through the colonizer’s eyes, putting on a white mask over a Black face. W.E.B. Du Bois called it “double consciousness.”

Think, for a moment, about the language most of us grew up with. In English, fair means beautiful. It also means just. And it means light-skinned. Dark days. A black mark on your record. The black sheep of the family. We absorb these associations long before we have the capacity to evaluate them, and they settle into the unconscious, quietly shaping what we find attractive, trustworthy, or competent. That, in a sentence, is what everyday bias is.

I want to be clear about something, because it matters: the women buying these creams are not foolish. In many cases, they are reading the market accurately. In 2016, a Thai company released an ad for a whitening pill in which a popular actress explained that her career depended on staying pale, while the screen showed her rival’s skin turning dark. The tagline told viewers that being white was all they needed to win. The public outrage was swift, and the company pulled the ad and apologized within days. But one Thai commenter put the uncomfortable truth plainly: in society as it actually works, whiter-skinned people really do win.

When the reward is real, internalized oppression doesn’t look like self-hatred. It looks like a survival strategy.

Closer to Home

Before my fellow Americans feel too comfortable shaking our heads at Bangkok billboards, consider our own backyard.

In 2008, Vanderbilt economist Joni Hersch studied thousands of legal immigrants to the United States and found that those with the lightest skin earned 8 to 15 percent more than those with the darkest, even after accounting for education, occupation, language skills, and country of origin. Being one shade lighter, she found, had about the same effect on earnings as an extra year of school. When she revisited the question in 2024 with newer data, the penalty was still there, at nearly the same size.

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey found that 62 percent of Latino adults believe darker skin hurts their ability to get ahead in this country. Darker-skinned Latinos were also far more likely to report being discriminated against by other Latinos: 41 percent, compared with 25 percent of their lighter-skinned peers. The hierarchy, once learned, does not need an outside enforcer.

The African American community has wrestled with this for generations, from the “paper bag test” used to police entry into certain social circles to the bleaching creams advertised in Black newspapers in the early twentieth century. Alice Walker is generally credited with giving it a name: colorism. And the products are still here. The FDA has repeatedly warned that mercury-laced lightening creams are sold illegally in U.S. shops serving Latino, Asian, African, and Middle Eastern communities.

I should name my own place in this. As a white man, I carry by birth the very complexion these products promise to sell. For most of my life, I never had to think about the color of my skin at all. That is what privilege so often is. Not something we feel, but something we never have to notice.

Can Changing a Name Change a Mind?

In the summer of 2020, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Unilever announced it would rename Fair & Lovely, a brand that controlled more than 80 percent of its category in India, as Glow & Lovely. Johnson & Johnson stopped selling its whitening creams altogether. Critics were quick to point out that the product inside the tube hadn’t changed, only the words on the outside.

They have a point. And yet I don’t want to dismiss it entirely. Language shapes what we see as normal, and normal is where bias does its most effective work. A company deciding it can no longer say fair out loud is a small crack in a very old wall.

But the wall is not, finally, made of marketing. It is made of what lives in us. So what can we actually do?

  • Notice the defaults. The next time you see an image labeled “beautiful,” “professional,” or “successful,” ask whose face appears, and whose doesn’t.
  • Talk with children about where their ideas of beauty come from—before the billboards do it for you.
  • Support the media, brands, and creators who show the full range of human skin as worthy.
  • Examine your own associations. Project Implicit offers a free skin-tone association test online. Take it with curiosity rather than judgment.

The longing to be seen as beautiful is deeply human. So is the longing to belong. The tragedy is that so many people around the world have been taught that the price of belonging is to erase a little of who they are.

Where did you learn what beautiful looks like? And who taught you?

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror. But you are eternity and you are the mirror. — Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Sources

About the Author

Howard J. Ross
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Howard J. Ross is a lifelong social justice advocate and globally recognized thought leader on unconscious bias, diversity, equity, and belonging. He is the bestselling author of Everyday Bias and ReInventing Diversity, and his award-winning book Our Search for Belonging received the Nautilus Gold Medal for Social Change. Howard founded Cook Ross Inc. and now leads Udarta Consulting, advising organizations worldwide on culture change and inclusive leadership.