After living in Bangkok for a few months I finally ran out of toiletries from home - Canada. A quick trip to find moisturiser and make-up led me to an awakening about cultural differences and similarities when it comes to beauty and what cost women around the world are willing to pay.
I come from a province called Saskatchewan in the middle of Canada. To say the temperature is cold is an understatement. In our winter months -40C is common, as is hiding within the warmth of our homes. With about four months of tolerable weather many women spend most of the year with fair, pale skin.
Yet when you look in magazines and fashion spreads in North America, the perception of beauty is sleek tanned models even if it's not the reflection we see in the mirror.
The billboards of Bangkok tell a different story. The faces of the beautiful are as white as the snow we hide from in Canada even though for many women here it is a complexion that is next to impossible to achieve.
Pallor is not a new trend by any means. Women and men have strived for pale complexions for centuries because it was synonymous with a life of leisure and wealth. The upper-class spent their time indoors out of the sun's reach, leaving it to the serfs to toil in the fields, darkening their skin colour. The golden glow women in North America strive for today was a sign of weathered labour and poverty.
The use of skin whitening techniques came into play to help achieve the pale beauty associated with prosperity.
Dangerous and often lethal practices were used, including the white lead powder that slowly soaked into Queen Elizabeth I's skin and is believed to have led to her eventual poisoning and death. Mercury-based products were also used for lightening and even though they caused disfigurement, ageing, and sometimes death, different variations were found in creams and lotions until the 1970s.
Tanned skin did not become popular until the late 1700s. In Europe during the industrial revolution the workers changed from labouring in the fields to toiling away inside factories. As the underclass moved into the cities to work the wealthy moved out to escape the smog and pollution. The idea of wealth changed to leisurely riding a horse outside and so a slight tan became a sign of health and prosperity. The tan's place in the idea of beauty was solidified when in the 1920s Coco Chanel, the epitome of attractiveness at the time, stepped off a boat with a rich Mediterranean tan. Soon there were bikinis, constant sunbathing, tanning lotions, and tanning beds. Even the Barbie doll got a tan.
Most women I know would like to say they have moved forward since the era of Jane Austen novels that confined women to corsets and shadows but all around the world we are confining ourselves financially and physically in the idea of an unsustainable beauty.
In Saskatchewan, tanning costs, on average, at least C$35 (1,080 baht) for 100 minutes, and that doesn't include the cost of goggles and lotions. To maintain a tan you have to make multiple visits a week during the long winter months. Although there are benefits to UV exposure like bone development and vitamin D, studies over decades have shown the price you pay is mostly with your health.
The US Public Health Service has stated that tanning is known to cause cancer. Constant tanning is shown to triple the risk of getting melanoma, the most dangerous and deadly skin cancer. It also raises the risk of other kinds of cancers that are less fatal but often cause permanent disfigurement. The US Food and Drug Administration has put people who use tanning beds alongside smokers in the highest cancer risk group.
What the women in Canada don't always recognise is that the models whose tans we admire have varying ancestries. Without risking your health there is no possible way for a woman who is purely Caucasian to maintain the tan of someone who is Latino. The price paid to maintain the porcelain skin that is desired here is similar. From make-up to moisturisers to body wash, the daily skin lightening routine carries a high fee. Beyond the steep prices in stores the bargains on the streets without FDA labels might still contain mercury. On top of that many women will shell out the big bucks for skin whitening or bleaching treatments.
A Google search shows treatments costing at least 5,000 baht. A Bangkok Post story from last year talks of a young woman spending 2,000 baht on a chemical treatment bought online that peeled more than the colour from her skin.
It's not surprising to read stories of negative reactions and fatal poisonings to whitening procedures in Thailand and Asia. It is not only the financial price and the health price that women around the world pay. We are also paying the price of our diversity. By fighting our heritage and cultural roots we are losing those differences that make us special. I do want to be beautiful, but I think it is time women start defining what beauty is on their own terms.
I feel the most beautiful when I am healthy, not sunburnt or pale, and being able to decide that my money will go towards fulfilling my dreams of being successful and independent on my mental attributes rather than my physical.
It is time for the women of the world to lose the chains of past societies that define beauty based on wealth and occupation.
I hope that we can fight the lure of a price tag and begin to feel the worth and treasure held inside our own skin.
Kelly Malone is an intern from Canada.