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We need to get over our complexion complex

Rosana She

by Rosana She

18 Aug 05:40am

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Filed under: Cancer, Health, Skin, Society, Tan

32 comments

It’s about time we show our true colours. Thanks to Coco Chanel, dark, brown skin that used to be only associated with the working class was redefined as “sun-kissed”.


Since then, the Western world has regarded bronzed skin as the symbol of chic and affluent jetsetters who can afford to travel all year round.  Celebrities and models compete for the best tan. Many aspire to perfect the St Tropez look. 

In fact the St Tropez look is so highly sought after that a whole range of fake tan product is named St Tropez – a town where its seaside resorts are frequented by rich guests in the summer. Things work somewhat differently in Asia though.

In Asia, where most people have darker skin compared to Caucasians, skin care and cosmetic product companies constantly remind Asians through their celebrity ambassadors and advertisement campaigns that alabaster skin is the way to go. 

The Chinese even has the saying “a white skin color is the best disguise to ugliness”. To Asians, skin whitening is a lifelong vocation, be it through slapping on whitening skin care products or going as far as getting medical injections to bleach their skin. 

So why is there such a difference in the perception of beauty in the West and the East when it comes to skin colour?  Is it due to the desire to have what we do not possess? The quest for the perfect skin color is so important to females (and in recent years, males too) that we are willing to ignore the blatant health risks. 

In Australia, our love of the sun has made us the skin cancer capital of the world; two in every three Australians are diagnosed with skin cancer before the age of 70 and at last count, more than 1850 deaths a year.   

Nevertheless, the statistics have not deterred us from tanning.  So much so that between 1996 and 2006, there had been a 400% increase in the number of solariums advertised in the Yellow Pages business directories for Australia’s capital cities. We visit tanning salons to top up our tans notwithstanding the fact that sunbeds carry with them an increased risk of cancer. 

More alarmingly, many young Australians agree that a tan looks healthy, despite knowing it is in fact “skin cells in trauma”. 

Cancer Council Australia has been carrying out campaigns aimed at educating youngsters about the hazards of UV light exposure, such is its annual creative competition aimed at high school students (See www.cancer.org.au/originalskin for details).

It is shocking the way we give up our health willingly in pursuit of beauty.  And it is such a curious thing too, beauty. The perception of beauty changes across cultures and through time. 

Some skeptical fashion editors have noticed a subtle change in the extreme tanning trend; it may be fading away with some of its avid fans, such as Victoria Beckham, announcing that they are opting for a more natural skin tone. 

This may not come as a surprise as more pale-skinned stars are being praised for their beauty. 

Perhaps this gradual reversion in the skin color trend may have a positive influence in the prevention of skin cancer as UV radiation, emitted from the sun or tanning beds in solariums, is harmful to the skin. 

Nonetheless, we must try to prevent the pendulum from swinging too far to the other side. Skin lightening is not in any sense more preferable as it often involves the use of toxic to bleach the skin. 

If only we can learn to love our own skin and be content with who we are. If only we can celebrate individuality instead of trying to be like everybody else. If only we can each be a trend-setter, not a follower.

After all, the perfect skin tone is not really worth dying for.

Most commented

349"Gifting", "journey" and other words we hate
296Thomson didn't answer the question everyone is asking
24612 bigger issues than gay change and climate marriage
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224The most laughable, err, spoof since Einfeld
224Punch on: Open thread 17/05/2012
215Punch on: Open thread 18/05/2012

32 comments

Show oldest | newest first

    • Kipling says:

      07:21am | 18/08/11

      Isn’t it ironic that at the same time many of our species consider human’s to be the most highly developed of the animal kingdom.
      Kind of need to rethink that position just a tad….

      Reply

    • Janez says:

      08:39am | 18/08/11

      Any reference to Coco Chanel is certainly not chic these days.  I would rather not have to hear the name Chanel ever again though ... Nazi spy that she was.  All in her latest new book. 

      I used to get teased for my pale skin by my more olive complexioned brothers - About time people accepted their colouring as what we are born with.  This goes both ways of course.  It has always been nigh on impossible for me to get any colouring even though I would like to look healthier, for want of a better word.

      Not so long ago even my mother expressed her dislike for my fine straight hair with me suffering many perms in my childhood ... Don’t know how long this current trend of it being fashionable and chic will last though.  I must admit to being tired of people asking me how I manage to get it so straight ... do I iron it?  Crikey!  Even the hairdressing staff have done this to me. 

      I guess the World will have to put up with me a little longer then.

    • MC says:

      11:07am | 18/08/11

      Yeah, im so glad the turtles invented the internet . . .

    • Joan Bennett says:

      07:37am | 18/08/11

      Nature gives you the skin tone that suits the rest of you, which is why it always looks ridiculous when people try to change it.  Even a fairish skinned person getting a tan looks a little weird.

      Reply

    • Tina says:

      07:57am | 18/08/11

      I am always amazed by the self perception of solarium users. Apart from the health aspect, the dark yellow wrinkly old leather skin indicates that they seem to have totally lost all sense of how they actually look like.

      Reply

    • Chris_D says:

      07:57am | 18/08/11

      Some Caucasian people think a tan looks healthy because people who have a tan tend to be more active, outgoing, outdoorsy types, and with that comes (generally) a healthier lifestyle, better fitness and .a better bod.

      Asians do not like being tanned because in their culture it represents being a commoner or peasant, working out in the fields, out in the sun.

      I always encourage my children to play outside,ride a bike, play sport etc, but to cover up with sunscreen, hat, shirt and rashie-vests if they are in the water.

      But these days, those who choose to just lie in the sun and bake themselves for hours while basting themselves in cooking oils just to get a darker tan are indeed morons.

      It’s really just common sense, but unfortunately, it’s just not that common these days.

      Reply

    • marley says:

      08:37am | 18/08/11

      True - why is it, by the way, that everyone is so critical of couch potatoes and not of beach potatoes?

    • Smidgeling says:

      10:10am | 18/08/11

      Because ‘beach-potatoes’ are usually people who have worked hard for a body worth showing off at the beach…

      Not that I understand the whole tanning thing…

    • fml says:

      12:05pm | 18/08/11

      coach potatoes are raw, beach potatoes are cooked. No one likes raw potato.

    • kat says:

      03:27pm | 18/08/11

      not sure about that, dont particularly like crispy burnt potato skins myself!

    • Michael says:

      08:00am | 18/08/11

      Actually humans are the only creatures that think humans are highly developed, a bunch of bees provide a better example of an efficiently functioning society than humans have so far.

      I would suggest 99.9% of species on this planet don’t consider “us” at all, until we show up to ruin their experience of existence

      Reply

    • stephen says:

      08:15am | 18/08/11

      ...especially with freckles it’s hard to get a tan cause the spots just won’t join up.
      (But if they do and with orange hair I don’t reckon a nikname like ‘jaffa’ would compensate.)

      Reply

    • Demoman says:

      09:21am | 18/08/11

      I always say I can tell a Dutch woman a mile away from her leathery orange skin, short bright blonde hair and pink lipstick. Ie miss Piggy.

      It was always amusing in Holland to see the UV glow coming out from peoples windows as you know they have their own sunbed.

      Reply

    • Paleface says:

      09:32am | 18/08/11

      I agree that we should be content with the colour skin we were born with. I suffered lots of sunburn as a child on family beach holidays in the days before the slip, slop, slap message and as a teenager trying to fit in with fashion because being pale was so uncool. I gave up trying to get a tan because I was more afraid of getting skin cancer. The upside of staying out of the sun is that I look much younger than my age. The downside was very low levels of Vitamin D which I probably had for years but only discovered via a routine check up. I’ve learned to love my pale skin and am taking vitamin D.

      Reply

    • Caroline says:

      09:55am | 18/08/11

      As a member of the pale skin team, I thank you for this post! It took me years, but I also have learned to love my pasty whiteness, and am no longer embarrassed to lather myself from head to toe in sunscreen, and run from shady patch to shady patch when I’m outside. It’s about time we as a country got over our love of tans, fake or otherwise. But especially fake. Is there anything worse than seeing people walking around looking like they’ve had a run-in with an orange crayon? It does NOT look good. It does NOT look natural. It looks tacky. People of Australia, it’s time to ditch the St Tropez!

      Reply

    • Kika says:

      10:31am | 18/08/11

      I really hope the tide is changing. Tanning is horrible. If you fake it - it looks horrible. If you do it for real - yeah it looks ‘healthy’ but you’ll be cursing yourself in 20 years when you look 10 times older than the pale girl who stayed in the shade.

      I have olive skin and I hate it. To me it looks yellow and ugly and I’d love to be able to blush. I have been really tempted to use skin lighteners to freshen up my appearance. The good stuff is hard to get in Australia but if you buy from overseas cosmetics sites the amount of products on the market for skin whitening (what they call ‘brightening’) is flabbergasting!

      But then you look at western culture and the incessant appetite for ‘darkening’ is weird too.

      I don’t think we’ll ever be happy with how we look. If you actually like the way you look well done! But as long as we feel insecure in ourselves the cosmetic companies will be there fuelling our addiction and insecurities all the way!

      Reply

    • Fiddler says:

      10:33am | 18/08/11

      Not sure about the validity of the science but we are starting to see some science emerging suggesting that it is other factors (such as the chemicals in sunscreen) that are causing the increase in skin cancer that and the fact that with sunscreen you can stay out in the sun for hours longer before getting burnt. I’m not making any claim either way but as with many things I don’t believe the “science is settled”

      Reply

    • Ted-e says:

      12:55pm | 18/08/11

      Can you point to this research? I thought the science was pretty clear that UV radiation (from the sun and solariums) is the major culprit, with a small percentage attributable to genetics.

      What is clear is the number of deaths from skin cancer: more than 1850 according to the Cancer Council: http://cancer.org.au/sunsmart

      There’s nothing to recommend tanning.

    • Kate says:

      05:11pm | 18/08/11

      Agree Ted-e.

      I think any link would not be because of sunscreen itself, but because a lot of people don’t apply (and reapply) it properly so they are not as protected as they think they are. It may also give some people a false sense of security so they forgo hats, long sleeved shirts, etc.

      Getting a few minutes of sunshine a day is a good thing as we all need vitamin D and I find it does wonders for my mood, but anyone who purposely goes tanning these days is quite simply an idiot.

    • Secondmouse says:

      10:33am | 18/08/11

      My face doesn’t colour, even in summer it stays pale, so getting a tan only makes me look like I’ve got my head stuck on someone else’s body. Not a good look.

      Reply

    • B says:

      12:23pm | 18/08/11

      Pallor in the face, symptom of Iron Deficiency Anemia. Check it out.

    • Skinful says:

      10:42am | 18/08/11

      Wish I had a darker skin - I’d be proud of it - no fake tans - amazing that so many want to be lily whites!  Black, brown brindle or pasty, now days we can be what ever colour we like.  But why not just be glad we have skin instead of colouring it, burning it to a cinder in the sun, and accept it’s the stuff that keeps our insides from falling out!

      Reply

    • Vanity in a Bottle says:

      10:45am | 18/08/11

      Beach potatoes become Cancer potatoes.  Wake up and buy a bottle of tan if you are so vain, like me!

      Reply

    • John the Zombie says:

      11:01am | 18/08/11

      So funny how ppl are addicted to looks. I remember years ago when I started wearing my Kara (steel bangle) I was teased and called a girl for it but all of sudden over last few years for a male to have a bangle or band around their hand wrist/hand has become the norm. Also not im naturally brown and love teasing my poor pale skin matez about it.

      Reply

    • Kricket says:

      11:56am | 18/08/11

      I love being a whitey and proudly show off my luminescent legs without a care in the world. Then again I’ve never been one to care too much about what people think.
      I’ve also never faked tanned as I think it looks ridiculous.

      I am jealous of my brother though, out of 5 kids from my Mum he’s the only one with the lovely dark italian complexion. B*stard. The rest of us just got the big nose.

      Reply

    • Shama says:

      12:06pm | 18/08/11

      Apart from numerous and predominant cultural factors, there is the climate factor.

      If you live in a cold climate, you want to be out in the sun.  In a predominantly hot country you are not that keen to be roasting yourself outdoors all hours of the day-peasants also cover themselves.  Even in Oz, people up north are less keen I find to be out in the sun than in the south.

      There’s a degree of beauty ritual too, not perhaps due to a complex - like for a wedding, party etc. where you may just be looking for a more aesthetic, decorated version of the self.

      Sometimes its just boredom really - like colouring your hair.

      Reply

    • Kassandra says:

      12:29pm | 18/08/11

      It started as a class thing amongst caucasians. Those who did manual labour worked outdoors and had tanned skin which also aged faster. Thus a pale skin was associated with higher social status, and all the snobs wore hats and sleeves and covered up so as to stay pale and smoother.

      When the workforce increasingly worked indoors instead of outdoors it switched - a suntan became an indicator of leisure time rather than work time - and a suntan became the status symbol rather than the moontan.

      Now people want to have their cake and eat it - the moontan, for the not-crocodile-skin look + fake tan for the status symbol.

      In people I have met who have naturally dark skin though it is the other way about - it is pale skin which is more desirable. Everyone seems to want what they don’t have. Maybe it’s just what people think looks more exotic.

      Reply

    • AFR says:

      04:43pm | 18/08/11

      I would say its more a class thing with Asians, as opposed to Caucasians. Watch a beuaty ad in Asia, girls are impossibly white, and all of the products have “whitening” agents in them.

    • Loxy says:

      12:47pm | 18/08/11

      Thank you for this article! I am pale skinned and suffered quite a lot of teasing and taunts in my childhood of the colour of my skin. As an adult in my 30’s people still think it’s funny to make some snide comment about my lack of a tan, especially if I’ve just got back from a summer holiday. While the comments used to really hurt, I’ve got used to it and accept that my white skin is here to stay. I look forward to the day when the lust for tanned skin fades away but I suspect it’s still easily 20+ years away.

      On the upside, I look a lot younger than most of my friends who spend time sunbaking!

      Reply

    • iMitchy says:

      02:36pm | 18/08/11

      My wife gets spray tans (occasionally).

      The lady who does it is really good and it looks very natural plus there are no yellow palms like you get from the bottled rub-on stuff. There is no risk of cancer caused by UV rays. If there is any dangerous chemicals in the spray it isn’t much of a concern because she only gets it done a few times a year as a novelty.
      I personally think it looks great. It’s sometimes nice for a bit of a change to keep things new and interesting and the thing I love most of all about the spray is the even skin tone from head to toe without lines.
      You can’t get that with a natural skin tone because we spend much of our lives in clothes. You can’t even get it from a suntan, even if you go naked, as naturally our skin tone differs slightly on different parts of our body - as well as the fact that parts of your body which normally see the sun have a headstart and will end up darker than the nether-regions.
      So you don’t need to risk the UV damage to get a sexy tan, spraying is quicker, cheaper, safer, lasts longer and looks better anyway.

      You may disagree with me but I think it’s the bomb. Might even get one myself oneday…

      PS - I don’t care much what colour or tone someone’s skin is, I just think a spraytan looks great on my missus.

      Reply

    • nikki heat says:

      03:15pm | 18/08/11

      Like many flora and fauna, human beings have three skin colours and two sexes.Get over it ! Avoid or stop being hung up about it!

      Reply

    • ooonis says:

      03:57pm | 18/08/11

      So true rosanna. We should start embracing our natural skin colour!! smile

      Reply
 
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