Writing Sample

In recent years, Chinese society has experienced a growing interest in skin tanning. In contrast to historical attitudes, people now voluntarily expose themselves to natural or artificial UV light to achieve a darker skin tone. This interest in tanning has begun to challenge traditional Chinese standards of beauty, which consider fair skin the height of attractiveness. Particularly in China’s top-tier cities, tanning has become part of the beauty regimen among young and middle-class consumers who have either lived overseas or who practice regular fitness training. Thanks to social media, however, the tanning craze has now spread to an even broader audience, one beyond middle-class cosmopolitan society. Given the increasing frequency with which dark-skinned people are portrayed as icons of a luxurious and healthy lifestyle through media and advertising, this tanning trend has begun to influence social groups not associated with the intercultural bourgeois, convincing them to adopt skin tanning as a fashionable lifestyle choice. This trend is by no means ubiquitous, however, as many people retain a preference for lighter skin tone. Thus, even though tanning has become more accepted and celebrated, the conventional beauty standard privileging fair skin remains dominant. Considering that the popularization of tanning is driven by the commercialization of western hegemonic values, the imposition of tanning with its underlying ideology could have detrimental consequences for Chinese consumers, most especially women, whose conventional standards of beauty are contravened by this fashion.

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Before investigating the tanning craze in China, the historical record concerning both skin tanning and skin whitening must be examined. In ancient China, poets depicted fair skin as a salient feature of feminine beauty. Poems such as “肤如凝脂” (‘Having a smooth fair skin that looks like solid pork fat’) from《诗经 (Book of Songs)》, though perhaps old-fashioned by current standards, idealized a fair complexion as desirable. In ancient times, the wealthy engaged in fewer outdoor activities, largely due to the fact that they neither farmed nor traveled far. Considering that they did not need or have opportunities to go out, most elites had little exposure to ultraviolet light and thus naturally retained smooth, fair skin. Consequently, fair skin came to signify high social status and affluence both within and among wealthy communities. As a further consequence, fair skin became a matter of prestige and was thus admired throughout all levels of society. Because fair skin was found exclusively among wealthy communities, it came to signify high social status and affluence, whereas its opposite, dark skin, came to be viewed as common and unsophisticated, a symbol of poverty and lack of privilege. For those with few means, the laboring class, outdoor activities were an unavoidable reality of life. Peasants possessed neither fortune nor status, a fact that was reinforced and exacerbated by their skin tone. This is exemplified in Bai Juyi’s poem 《观刈麦 (Watching the Barley Harvest)》, which describes how farmers had to “背灼炎天光” (‘have their backs burning under the severe sunlight’): conditions that inevitably contributed to a darker tone and rougher texture of the skin. This darker skin color was thus closely associated with physical labor and, as a result, low social status.

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Just as traditional Chinese standards of attractiveness favored light skin, European representations of feminine beauty, stretching from the Middle Ages well into the 19th century, exhibited a similar preference, indicating that fair skin was the greatest physical signifier of wealth and beauty throughout that continent as well. However, this situation changed as industrialization swept across Europe. With the invention of cars and trains, the wealthy gained increased mobility. This proved especially advantageous for elite women, as they could now travel further from home, spending holidays at the ocean and lake-side resorts where they were naturally, and perhaps unintentionally, exposed to more sunlight, at least as much as was possible given the modesty of early swimsuits. Merchants saw this holiday migration to sunnier locales as a business opportunity; hence they seized on the chance to promote beach getaways and the tanning products needed to undertake them. While these products may initially have been intended as a guard against tanned skin, they quickly became a means of protecting the skin from harmful ultraviolet exposure for the purpose of skin tanning. Thus, the advertising that grew from this new industry was tailored to people who associated affluence with a darker shade of skin. With the success of this business, manufacturers began to eye the burgeoning middle-class as a potentially more profitable market than the upper class. The problem, of course, was the former’s lack of mobility and disposable income relative to the elites sunning themselves at resorts. To meet the middle-class desire for upward social mobility without draining their limited financial resources for travel and holiday, manufacturers began developing products intended to produce the effects of tanning without extended exposure to sunlight. The earliest such products were less effective than sunbathing, but eventually technology was developed that permitted indoor tanning through artificially generated UV light. All of these developments were brought together in marketing that glorified tanning and its accompanying skin tone as a symbol of attractiveness and even sex appeal. Cities and towns experienced a flood of such media in the form of billboards, magazines, and eventually movies and television. The inevitable result was that tanning and darker skin became prized in western mainstream culture.

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The hegemonic ideology of whiteness that long prevailed in Chinese society meant that fair skin enjoyed the connotative meaning of physical attraction. This fact renders the growing popularity of skin tanning in China today an apparent act of counter-hegemony, one which values individuality over convention, and which is essentially a modern idealization of western beauty standards. Indeed, skin tanning is a western value that has been exported to China, and that prevails among middle-class international social groups. It appears largely to be the case that Chinese citizens who appreciate bronzed skin are those who have assimilated a degree of western cultural influence. As this craze has expanded, skin tanning has become a subculture within Chinese society, one in which people can resist standards of fair skin. Within this subculture, dark or bronzed skin now signifies prestige, health, and perhaps most tellingly, knowledge. This is so because: 1) tanning sessions are expensive and time-consuming; 2) people with tanned skin are viewed as active, typically engaged in athletic outdoor activities; and 3) those who accept this standard of beauty are most likely to have lived or studied abroad. The significance of this last point cannot be overlooked: there is a direct correlation between foreign education and attitudes toward tanning, which in turn suggests possible causation. This is likely the case as personal or family wealth is often a prerequisite to study abroad, during which students are exposed to new values and ideologies that necessarily include fashionable trends. As tanning remains popular in occidental society, Chinese students in western universities are likely to encounter this phenomenon and perhaps even perceive it as a means of assimilation. For instance, tanning may have a special status in the United States, where recent debates on racism have promoted a greater diversity of skin color in the media. Therefore, Chinese citizens studying, as well as those working abroad, may gradually absorb western ideologies, including accompanying standards of beauty.

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Considering tanned skin to be beautiful has long been a dominant value in western societies, most especially North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. After import to China, however, this value was modified. Its challenge to conventional Chinese values suggests that it may be acting as a form of cultural hegemony, an imperialist imposition of dominant western values on Chinese society. In other words, such a Eurocentric beauty standard could be considered a modern form of colonialism since it involves western ideologies extending their power across Chinese territory; thus, conventional standards are being replaced by an imported fashion. In this manner, media promotion of tanning constitutes a visual interpellation of the viewer as subject to a foreign ideology. In the case of tanning, such a transformation is especially dramatic because it changes a person’s natural appearance: so abstract and so powerful are ideologies that, as in the case of tanning, they have developed the biopower to alter an individual’s very appearance according to a single criterion, with the further potential to alter a society’s appearance, at least in part. Such hegemony constitutes an extraordinary example of interpellation because the newly created subject is framed not only by foreign ideology but moreover by a physical manifestation of that ideology.

Such an imported beauty standard, like every other existing beauty standard, raises concerns regarding mental and physical health, especially as skin tanning has become commercialized and as it has increasingly targeted specific groups by gender and sexual orientation. As this subculture grows, the market for skin tanning expands and becomes more profitable. From vintage western commercials to recent Chinese ads, tanning salons market their products as a means for customers to change their skin color and bodily appearance. Tanning salons that primarily target heterosexual female customers and homosexual male customers situate the male gaze within their advertisements to attract potential customers. These tanning advertisements show tanning results by revealing as much skin as possible, usually with implications of sexual attractiveness. When people react to commercials that call out to them, they are transformed into subjects that reinforce the ideology of the advertiser. That is, an aspect of their humanity is commodified. Advertisers promote this unrealistic and illusory sense of individuality precisely to attract customers who are inclined to pay to be part of tanning culture to express their individuality. This sense of individuality is valued as it gives people a feeling of control through choice. The tanning industry offers customers a pseudo-individuality wherein they may believe that choosing to tan is an expression of the self precisely because it goes against cultural norms. Such emphasis on fashion masks the dangers inherent in increased exposure to ultraviolet light, most notably the risk of accelerated epidermal aging, sunburn, and even skin cancer.

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Aside from the potential consequences to a person’s wellbeing posed by skin tanning, this trend also has the potential to introduce an element of diversity into Chinese notions of beauty. Before skin tanning was brought to China, the only criterion for beauty was the degree to which one’s skin was fair. Now, this standard has been challenged by tanning practices, offering people a greater variety of choices and the chance to be appreciated according to a new and different standard. The prevalence of skin tanning offers the possibility for differing standards to permit a diversification of notions of beauty, which could in turn expand standards to include ethnic minorities within China who have never wished to conform to conventional ideals of attractiveness. Despite the extensive historical connotations that underpin both fair- and dark-skinned standards, the fact that competing cultural perspectives can coexist is encouraging for the recognition of a variety of cultural values. Such divergent values — even beyond the discourse surrounding skin tone — offer greater opportunities for people of all colors to be appreciated. Whenever competing ideologies become the focus of this discourse, the discussion should be re-centered on the celebration of diversity through the inclusion of contrary standards.