The White Beauty Myth........

I was going to post about it earlier but lazyness overtook me. So part of channel 4's race thingy was a programme called Bleach, Nip, Tuck: The White Beauty Myth. During that hour long special they followed three individuals who all wanted one thing: European Features=white skin.


Take Mun, mid-twentys who let me tell you is one fine looking guy, however he blames his ethnicity which is Asian for his lacklustre modelling career. To get to the top he believes that you have to look european,  ( Tyson Beckford would disagree but anyhoo...) so what is he contemplating??? Drastic Facial surgery to make his jaw line more prominent and his nose narrower......As i was watching this i was just shaking my head, he wanted to look more european just so that he could 'fit in'. Near the end of the program it was so heartbreaking to discover that all his ideas stemmed from a traumatic child hood experience where he was racially assaulted. 


Same with Jet, an Afro-Caribbean woman who hates her nose because it made her look poor. she lives in a gated community in Essex...i know Essex....where only 2 other black people live. Dolls let me tell you she made me scream at the tv because her problem wasn't just her nose, if it was up to her she would be white. She constantly rejected her identity because it didn't fit in with her lifestyle......she's a glamour model for fucks sake!  Again she wanted to distance herself from her 'blackness' because she was attacked by a group of black girls. I don't condone violence but some of that shit she said would have easily made the most mild-mannered person smack'er  one! Whenever i closed my eyes and heard her talk it was a white person talking derogatorily talking about black people. 


Next was a  lay from Banghladesh who felt she was inadequate because she had darker skin. to be honest i heard of this 'colour prejudice' in Asia where the lighter you are the prettier...mind you this phenomena exists everywhere. Anyways i heard friend of mines talking about how they can't marry anyone darker than them , or i have one friend who's quite dark and whenever he's playin around with his mates, one of them always had something to say about his skin colour. His face would just look so hurt, you can't imagine how i felt for him. 


That show was just sad, it sickens me that western advertising has made some people actually attempt to de-racialise themselves. All these advertising companies don't know what sort of damage they do, they are literally making some people want to die. As a black person my skin crawled when one of the women who had darker skin said that she thought that having her skin tone was the worst thing in the world, and how a 'black nose' is a punishment from god????