Beauty, as everyone agrees to disagree, is in the eye of the male beholder. When Nonthawan “Maeya” Thongleng was crowned Miss Thailand World last weekend, the social media was abuzz with obnoxious comments that attacked her for being “dark-skinned” and thus “not beautiful”. Quickly though, sensible commentators countered that skin colour has nothing to do with beauty and that some Thais’ obsession with a white, pearly complexion was unhealthy and bordering on racist.
Contestants in swimsuits at Miss Thailand 1971.
A report by Thai Rath newspaper defended Nonthawan’s “dark-skinned” quality and praised the jury for crowning her, and yet the way the news article described her victory was telling. Nonthawan, the paper says, “breaks the rule of skin colour”. In most other reports, Nonthawan, a native of the South, is invariably described as nang ngam pew si – the coloured beauty queen, as if Thailand has a formal racial classification.
Who defines Thai beauty? That’s as knotty a question as the one about Thainess, and about beauty itself. Skin colour; facial proportion; slimness (or plumpness) of limbs and lips; shape of nose, mouth, eyes, ears, teeth. What are, if there are any at all, the rules?
On the competitive stage, the last “dark-skinned beauty queen” (meaning not glowingly white), according to Thai Rath, was Tanya Suesantisuk in 1997. Otherwise, most Thai beauty queens tend to have fair skin. On television, tanned, copper or honey-hued actresses have complained, quietly, about the lack of offers for leading roles, unless they’re comedians. Not to mention TV commercials, which sometimes openly mock any women (and sometimes men) who’re not light-skinned enough.
“The meaning of beauty changes over the course of time,” says historian Sujit Wongtes. “The idea that light-coloured skin is beauty is a form of modern cultural marketing.”
During the Ayutthaya period, Sujit explains, women who had white skin were perceived as pale and sickly and a beautiful woman was seen as someone that had a smooth glow, neither dark nor white. More curious to contemporary observers is the fact that beauty in those days meant having black teeth, achieved by the constant chewing of betel nut.
“Having white teeth was compared to having dog’s teeth or buffalo’s teeth,” says Sujit, who’s written many books on the life and culture of old Siam. “Later, taste changed. People saw Westerners having white teeth and wanted to look like that.”
Miss Thailand 1987 contestants.
In the record of French diplomat Simon de Laloubere who came to Ayutthaya in the 17th century, he described the people as having “short noses with blunt ends. They have bigger ears than ours. The bigger the ears, the more admired the person is”.
Then the face: according to Laloubere, Ayutthaya people had “the face in the shape of a trapezoid, not oval… A wide face, opening up towards the cheekbone… hollow cheeks, broad mouth with thick, pale lips and black teeth. The skin colour is brown and red”. Just imagine today’s beauty queens or TV presenters sporting a short, dull nose, large ears and red-brown skin; we’re conditioned to perceive that as plainly unthinkable.
Before television and globalisation, what perhaps offered the most accurate glimpse into the ideal of Thai beauty were the literary masterpieces of the time that shaped people’s culture and taste. From Sunthorn Phu, (1786–1855) to modern day authors (mostly men), their perception of women’s beauty both reflect society’s ideal appearance and define beauty of that certain period.
In Sunthorn Pu’s Khun Chang Khun Phaen, a leading character, Pimpilalai, was described as having a “perfect figure as if chiselled, with glossy black hair”, and having a “slim waist”. Another lady, Soi Fah, hypnotised Khun Phaen’s son with “a flawless face, softly arched eyebrows, captivating eyes, perfectly curved nose, red lips, peach-coloured cheeks, round chin and neck and a perfect figure that is not skinny”.
Flash forward to 1966 and we have Dao Phrasook, another popular fictional lady as imagined by Srithong Ladawal in her famous novel of the same name. The story has been made into a film and a TV drama many times, starring legendary actresses such as Pissamai Wilaisak (1966), Apaporn Korntip (1981), Sakaojai Poonsawat (1994), Suvanant Kongying (1994) and Atima Thanaseneewat (2002), each reflecting the image of refined beauty through the decades. In the novel, Dao Phrasook has “eyes that sparkle like stars” and “delicate eyelids as if made of flower petals, her eyes black like onyx”. Her skin was “white like fresh milk”, while her figure was “full and slender”.
The “white like fresh milk” extract shows that the current glorification of white skin isn’t entirely a 21st century phenomenon. The “full and slender” part is also noteworthy in the idea of beauty through the passing years. In a contemporary example, we have the 2011 serial novel that was adapted into the mega-hit TV series Suphap Burut Juthathep. In the story, a character called Krongkaew Boonmee is crowned a beauty queen and is described as having “an oval-shaped [face] and her eyes are big and round, rimmed with naturally thick eyelashes. Her nose is defined, her lips adorably full… her skin is clear, although she is a farmer’s daughter. Her figure is slender, her waist small and her hips wide”.
In short, from Soi Fah to Krongkaew, the beauty of the era has grown slimmer and slimmer. Being thin, which was once an undesirable feature in a woman, is now a positive quality. The ideal nose — what Laloubere once described as blunt — now tends to lean more towards that of Caucasians. The desirable complexion has shifted from just flawless to milky white.
But maybe such a shift is inevitable. ML Poomchai Chumbala, who served on the jury of this year’s Miss Thailand Universe beauty contest, believes that ideal beauty keeps changing through the ages and popular taste. What’s powerful, he says, is our “hunger for the strange and the new”.
“It’s not a written rule,” says ML Poomchai, “but this hunger is very influential in moving the world of beauty ahead.
“People say that ‘popular taste’ or culture usually looks forward to something that’s far in the horizon, but at the same time, culture also looks backward to the things closest to us. It tries to find the strange and the new upon the roots of what we’re familiar with.”
So, dark skin or sickly-milky white, oval or square face, blunt or sharp nose — the rules of beauty keep changing. With Nonthawan’s win last week, we’re witnessing the shift with our own eyes, and it’s a particularly welcoming one.
