Skin-whitening dangers [-Brown is Beautiful!!!]

Friday, 20 July 2012
Soma Norodom
The Phnom Penh Post

Growing up in California, many of the locals’ skin colour is tan due to hanging out at the beach and the sunny weather all year round. In the US, advertisements connect beauty and success with a darker skin colour, other than white.

Those who wish to be tan, or brown, spend money on products to keep their skin colour tan and brown. People who have tans portray an image that they have money, as they can afford to go on vacation, relax on the beach, while getting a nice tan.

But in other countries, like Thailand, India and the Philippines, many seek to be white, or lighter, as this is promoted as a social status. Cambodia is one of several countries exposed to a variety of skin whitening products.

"What's Khmer Beauty?" - Op-Ed by Khmer Guardian

024 - KG - What is Khmer Beauty
http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/60371149?access_key=key-2g25e40ie033e8z4jhaf

King-Father's funny story: The era of the white-skin Khmer women

Translated from French by Luc Sâr

Funny Story
“They peel their skins” (sic!) to become “white women”
By N. Sihanouk

Every day, I watch TVK. And the “thing” that intrigues me the most is the “spectacle” of young Khmer women who all became “super-white,” i.e., each one of them has a face, hands, shoulders, legs whiter that those of the white race French, Europeans, Americans!

While regretting that out Khmer Race “practically” no longer has any more young ladies with tanned skin, I did not fail to ask the ladies in waiting of my Wife (they are serving her with an exemplary devotion) how all these young women did, to arrive to this “staggering” result: to become whiter than the white women and to be endowed with an ultra-milky skin.

These ladies in waiting “explained” to me that the ultra-white young women “peeled off their skin” –sic!–, i.e., they have their “not white enough” skin peeled off and they daubed their respective bodies with a new beauty product, “whitening” to the extreme the head, the shoulders, the hands, the legs and the “rest” of the body.

o O o

Now, to have oneself’s skin peeled is for sure extremely, superhumanly painful. Then, “to get rid” the body of one’s skin is “to uncover” oneself with bleeding flesh, worthy of a horror film from the 30s-40s with the “monsters” Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi! Under these horrible conditions, how could one daubs the bleeding flesh with a Devil (or Godsend, if wants to put it that way) product “capable” of transforming a woman into an ultra-white “goddess”, whiter and more “milky” than the milk from a mother, a “nursemaid,” or a cow?

o O o

To “simplify” “things,” I believe that, simply, one has found (where from?) a “chemical” formula “capable” of transforming even a tanned … or black skin into an ultra-white skin.

It is to believe that our “Rich” and “Powerful” are now crazy about “ultra-white” Khmer women, and they disdain Khmer women with tanned, brown, dark … or black skin.

(Signed) Norodom Sihanouk