Rosy White Lie

As you sit on the couch and turn on that idiot box, you see on scene a woman in pink walking through a passing crowd. Then, fate crosses her path to a man with whom she had a relationship in the past. The man notices her rosy white skin and is instantly love stricken as though saying: "Can you be mine again?" The woman looks at him longingly as if implying her sweet approval. Then they are lost from each other's sight. The music plays fast with thrill. The woman runs up a room of a skyscraper and opened the window. And presto! There she sees the man in opposite building proposing a marriage to her. The huge cut letters spell out: WILL YOU MARRY ME AGAIN? Or so that is how the commercial director wanted to spin the yarn.

If you were a couch potato some five years ago, surely you are not a stranger to this commercial skit. It is the advertisement of Ponds, one of those whitening products that promises a rosy white skin - in just two weeks! So, how does that grab you?

Ponds and among others like Silka, Vaseline, Maxi Peel, Metathione, Belo Essentials... these are just some to name whitening products so widespread in the markets like the frogs of Egypt. These whitening stuffs include facial creams, body lotions, soaps, fluids and capsules.

As there is nothing wrong with craving to have a rosy white skin nor with being naturally light skinned, the horrible side of it is how in our lives today that beauty is wrongly perceived. There is a growing "misequation" of being beautiful and having white skin.

Needless to say the media as a culprit, the print media is an agent which shares a part in sowing these seeds of misconception in our  minds. As you turn the glossy pages or look at the screen of gigantic billboards, you can see a massive circle of melanin deprived women topping. Seldom you spot morena beauties in the scenes. This leaves Juan Dela Cruz misconstrue that the only ideal to become beautiful are those with light skin.

However, one cannot blame such a crook to the media alone. Such a lie has been an old business down our racial experience. Tracing the roots of foreign conquests in the country, you can find how the Spanish made the Filipinos feel inferior in almost all aspects of life. Over the course of history, this very same inferiority complex was impressed in the concept about beauty of Filipinos.

Today it is apparently natural that when you hear that a person is a foreigner, you logically think that he is handsome or she is beautiful, and for that, superior. This could be the reason why medical tourism is becoming a popular culture nowadays. Many experts are on the research of discovering faster and easier ways of achieving white skin.

Unfortunately, in spite of this, not many determined people are making solution to alter this kind of mentality. The stigma is even stronger. It is seemingly a trivial issue but it is in fact a social malady; subconsciously accepted as a social norm.

Somehow, it is a fact that the society demands every person to look beautiful. Being beautiful is a prized symbol. However, it should be understood also that being beautiful does not necessitate a rosy white skin. You do not need to horse around and look for ways to attain what is the crooked view about beauty.

The reality is that, true beauty is the one that is what we are inside our hearts; not about having a rosy white skin - artificial or natural... for what is then beauty but a blossom that never lasts....

P.S. Yours truly wrote this during college and is not bitter once and for all. Peace.