Where did "fair = beautiful" come from? A Thai forum debates it

On Pantip, someone asked a question many Thai readers recognise: today most people seem to prefer fair skin and link it with beauty, so where did that start? Did people in the Ayutthaya era, before much contact with foreigners, also prefer lighter skin?

What the replies said:

• Several people blamed recent decades of product advertising for pushing the idea.

• One argued it's mostly personal taste and asked the poster what they'd find attractive regardless of trends.

• Another said tanned skin with sharp features used to be admired, and that the shift towards very fair skin came with the Korean drama wave.

• Some pointed to older sources: a scene in classic Thai literature where a girl is coated in turmeric paste to glow golden, suggesting the old ideal was a warm yellow sheen rather than white; others cited old photos of heavily powdered court dancers and fair-versus-dark symbolism inherited from Indian culture.

• A few traced it to Chinese, Japanese and Western influence, including merchant families.

No consensus: roughly half saw an old preference, half a modern marketing effect.

Desk note: labels add to the confusion. In Korean regulation, "whitening" is a functional cosmetic category defined around melanin: preventing melanin pigmentation, or fading existing pigmentation, according to ChemLinked's summary of Korean cosmetic rules. In other words, on a Korean product the word targets dark spots and uneven tone, not changing someone's natural skin colour. Many brands now print "brightening" in English for exactly that reason.

When you see "whitening" on a label, what do you expect it to do: fade spots, even out tone, or something else?

Original thread: Pantip — where did "white = beautiful" in Thailand come from? · Reference: ChemLinked — South Korea cosmetic regulation

#Whitening #Brightening #BeautyStandards