As any anatomy student will confirm, beauty is not just skin deep.
I think there’s a joke in there somewhere just trying to get out. But I’ll leave it at that 🙂
But of course bone structure and alignment are actually at the core of what we consider modern beauty. Which itself is a moving target – what’s considered healthy and beautiful today is definitely not the same as that we considered healthy a hundred years ago!
Not just because our knowledge and understanding has changed. But also because tastes and fashions change too.
Those ‘fashions’ dictate at the very core how we desire to look.
And that means everything from what we consider ‘fat’ to even the very color of our skins. Look at reviews of the Meladerm cream for example. That’s not a product we would have been looking for or even making just 50 years ago.
But this kind of whitening skin cream product has now become very popular, particularly amongst ethnicities with naturally darker skin who are looking for a mild to moderate lightening effect, to change appearance and tone of their natural skin color. Typically on the face. Korean women for example are reknowned for their porcelain skin tone, and many women of darker complexions want that same look. It’s a phenomenon driven by our media and advertising rich world we live in. Everywhere we see ‘perfect’ images of women who come from completely different parts of the world and have inherited genetically different looks and skin tones/types. We want those looks because they are beautiful even though they may be fundamentally unattainable due to differing ethnicity.
It’s interesting that these skin lightening products also have many other uses, you can even use it as an armpit whitening cream. Which doesn’t seem to be something men would ever use themselves, but women are actively seeking out ways to whiten the skin in their armpit areas. Although our armpit skin is often naturally a different tone to that of the other areas of our body, this really matters to some people. If we lived in a culture where women didn’t shave their underarm areas and/or expose those areas then it wouldn’t matter. But that isn’t the current fashion and it does therefore matter to people, so shouldn’t be dismissed too lightly.
Such fashions change – as lighter skinned people attempt to tan themselves darker, and vice versa. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong here, it’s just a case of what we are exposed to, globalisation and how our ideas of beauty change over time as a result. It may sound a little crazy but if an exquisitely beautiful alien race with green skin came to live amongst us, it would likely take less than 50 years before people would start adding green tinges to their skins in order to look more beautiful.
