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...

Race, Beauty and Skin Bleaching

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A Dominican-American artist examines the delicate relationship between beauty and race relations in a new exhibition in Washington Heights, Manhattan. NY1's Shazia Khan filed the following report.

Growing up with dark skin and curly hair in Washington Heights, Dominican-American artist Tony Peralta says he was considered to be ugly by his community and his own family.

"My mom would say things like, 'You know, I don't know where you came out with such bad hair.' She was like, 'Oh, it's from your fathers side.' She would say things like that and, you know, they say it kind of with humor, but as a young child, you know, it starts just kind of like picks at your self-esteem," says Peralta. "And then from, you know, the color issue, like me being the darkest one from my family and never being seen as like the handsome one."

In his deeply personal show, "Complejo," which means "complex" in Spanish, on view at the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance Gallery, Peralta pushes conversation about his culture's standard of beauty, which he says is light skin, straight hair and a narrow nose.

"Complejo" was inspired in part by the dramatic transformation of Sammy Sosa, the former Chicago Cubs slugger of Dominican decent, who now has straight hair and a significantly lighter complexion. 

"I don't have anything against Sammy Sosa, but it's just something that needs to be spoken about. It's just like the elephant in the room and people don't talk about race relations like that between each other," says Peralta.

http://bronx.ny1.com/content/ny1_living/arts/144550/upper-manhattan-art-exhibit-takes-on-racialized-beauty-ideals