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| White Makes You Win |
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| 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough |
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| 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough |
The economic principle I’m exploring is “Institutions are the “rules of the game” that influence choices”.
My research question to help me study the economic principle is “What aspects of beauty do companies target?”.
The articles titled White Makes You Win and 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough demonstrates this economic principle because it shows how cultural norms of skin whitening and aspiring to have more European features have been used by the beauty industry to feed into darker skinned people’s insecurities.
A Thai company called Seoul Secret marketed off of the insecurities of being “too dark” when they marketed their new skin bleaching product, Snowz, along with the slogan, White Makes You Win. The commercial, Seoul Secret White Makes You Win Advertisement, depicts Thai actress, Cris Horwang, in blackface as her fair skin counterpart becomes more desirable due to using Snowz and having lighter skin. This commercial implied that darker skinned people should feel bad for having a darker hue and should aspire to be 'more white" in order to be prettier or accepted by society.
The need to be “more white” is also found in the United States. The skin lightening regime became more popular between the late 19th century and early 20th century within the black community. According to 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough, “Skin bleaching was seen as more than a beauty ritual — it was a symbolic way to progress in a prejudiced society, where lighter-skinned black people encountered comparatively better treatment”. Advertisers profited off of this prejudice and “[promised] women that they could “occupy higher positions socially and commercially, marry better, get along better” by using skin bleaching products. However, the need to appear more white started to decrease as the pro-black movement started to take arise during the Civil Rights Movement, and more black people started to embraced their afroid features. In an attempt to gain back their clientele, beauty companies coined the term “skin brightening” in order to sound less problematic and more appealing to potential customers.
Skin bleaching rituals are stilled being practiced across the world, particularly in Africa, India, and Pakistan, where there is a noticeable population of darker-skinned people, according to 7 Ways The Beauty Industry Convinced Women That They Weren’t Good Enough. The multibillion-dollar industry fails to mention, however, the high, and potentially deadly, health risks. The White Makes You Win article states that “[the] World Health Organization (WHO) [found that] skin bleaching products can cause blood cancer such as Leukemia, liver and kidney cancer and could also result in severe skin conditions”. Certain chemicals found in skin bleaching products, such as hydroquinone, which is used to develop photographs and is banned in Australia, Japan, and most European countries, and Mercury, have been linked to causing major health issues or illnesses. Trying “to become white” can cost skin bleaching users their lives if they use these harsh chemicals religiously. The need "to be white" is truly a life or death situation, all in the name of beauty.
In my next blog post, I will research: How have “aspects of beauty” changed?
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