Indonesia - Michael Jackson Whitening House

YOGYAKARTA, Indonesia – On any given day, the poolside of the Yogyakarta Hyatt Regency Hotel swims with pasty, Vitamin-D-deprived European and American flesh. Businessmen snatch a few hours of sunshine between meetings, warming their bellies in the tropical morning rays. Visiting honeymooners make the most of clear spells to sip cocktails in the sunshine while they bake in coconut-scented tanning oil.

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As the Westerners cook themselves brown, a hundred meters down the street, at the Michael Jackson Whitening House, Indonesian men and women pay exorbitant fees to have their dark skin scrubbed, scraped and burned away with exotic chemicals.

The Michael Jackson Whitening House is just one of several salons and clinics in this student-filled city of half a million in Central Java that offers skin-whitening treatments.

The salons, which are most popular with the city’s wealthy and young elite, offer a more extreme version of skincare that is already commonplace in Indonesia. In supermarkets and drugstores here, major brands offer a vast selection of skin-lightening products, from soap to lotions to “restorative” face masks that promise astonishing results.

Far from taboo, the cosmetic process of skin-lightening seems to have become a popular and mainstream form of self-beautification among young Indonesians. Interviews with several 20-somethings and teenagers in this city revealed that most young people find the use of skin-lightening products and the more extreme “treatments” entirely acceptable, if prohibitively expensive.

source : http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/indonesia/101125/indonesia-michael-jackson...