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The mental colonized and the beauty standards.
(xhslink.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2026
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GenZedong
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Pulling culture and racist internalizations out of the equation, isn't beauty just context dependent to begin with? Like people generally cluster towards darker skin closer to the equator and lighter skin further from it?
Thus in a vacuum all our preferences might simply change with the weather and vibe?
You are correct. In a healthy scenario where colonial and imperialist culture are non existent, it should be the case that beauty is defined by the local or regional context.
Sadly, it doesn't happen like that and we get data maps like this
Whiteness in colonized countries tends to be the desire trait
I really want to know where that map is from, because there's no way it's right for where I live. People do tan here a lot, and it's a marker of beauty, but only when done naturally, by the Sun, and not with machines.
I added the link to the post that has the map in my comment. In that link, they explain where they get the data.
You can find the link if you click on "data maps".
Tanning is incredibly dangerous. It is literally burning your skin, destroying DNA in the process. It can give you skin cancer and ages your skin faster. It's a bad idea. I don't know how "skin-whitening", which is the first I'm hearing of this, works, but I wouldn't imagine it has no health disadvantages.
I have no idea why anyone would want to change the color of their skin. It is literally a completely meaningless property. It makes no difference whatsoever. The idea that one might want to is uncomfortable to me.
Skin lightening products can be very dangerous, depending on their active ingredients. A common side effect is dermatitis, or inflammation characterized by itchiness, redness, and a rash. Many more severe reactions are possible as well, as shown in the fourth column here.
skin tanning is also dangerous as too much uv light exposure is a cause for skin cancer
Yep! But others already spoke to that elsewhere in the thread. o7
I'll second Che's Motorcycle's comment about the dangers of skin whitening.
As to the property of skin color, it's a generally considered to be an evolutionary adaptation to environments from a time when humans rarely traveled very far from their birth places. Paler skin reduced vitamin D deficiencies in lower light environments, and darker skin reduced melanomas in high sunlight environments.
Of course, in an era of suncreen and vitamin D pills, they are pretty much meaningless, though mid range skin tones have lower melanoma rates while retaining high likelihood of detecting melanomas early.
The idea of skin whitening in places like Russia or Scandinavia suffuses me with an indescribably primal terror.
Translucency...
Clearly, Russian secret agents use skin whitening to become invisible:
Literally laughed. Thanks!
🤣