    
Sabiana
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Username: Sabiana
Post Number: 125
Registered: 08-2006
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Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, June 21, 2007 - 02:12 am: | 
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L'Oreal calls this marketing strategy 'Geocosmetics:
More than half of Korean women experience brown spots and 30 per cent of them have a dull complexion. Over-production of melanin deep in the skin that triggers brown spots and accumulation of melanin loaded dead cells at the skin's surface create a dull and uneven complexion. Vichy Laboratories has been able to associate the complementary effectiveness of Kojic Acid and pure Vitamin C in an everyday face care: BI-White.
Another L'Oreal advertisement for skin-whitening brand is called "White Perfect." This particular skin-whitening brand is sold in L'Oreal's Asian markets and online e-shops. In that way, those who live outside Asia can purchase this and other L'Oreal skin-whitening brands over the internet.
In this ad, the racist aesthetics of "White-Perfect" reinforces the biomedicalized intervention of Asian women's skin coded by the sign of "Melanin-Block™." L'Oreal's advertisements for skin-whitening cosmetics are often reinforced by constant interplay between the ideological precepts of white supremacy and the technologically-mediated suppression or "blocking" of the capacity for Asian women's bodies and skins to produce skin pigment, melanin.
One of the ways in which L'Oreal enacts the biomedicalization of women's bodies and the racialization of the aging processes of women (gendered degeneracy) is through the visual technology of dismembering women's bodies. A close examination of L'Oreal's advertisings for skin-whitening products shows a systematic fragmentation of women's bodies. Almost all the L'Oreal advertising images which I have came across use cropped faces of women. One of the visual techniques used by L'Oreal is the pairing of two cropped faces: one of which bears certain pseudo-pathologies such as 'age spots,' premature-aging,' 'hyper-pigmentation,' and 'wrinkles.' The other cropped image would feature the whitened, 'smooth, wrinkle-free' face of a woman.
As a result, L'Oreal's advertising often visually conceptualizes the practice of skin-whitening both as a violent technological fragmentation of women's bodies as well as an instrument of bodily transformation. As the following advertising for L'Oreal's skin-whitening brand, Blanc Expert, shows, the visual fragmentation of women's bodies is often reinforced by the claims of the power of these skin-whitening products to penetrate deep inside the body thereby transforming both the inside and the outside of the users of these products.
Lancôme's exclusive Melo-No Complex™ limits the activity of the messenger NO, a newly-discovered stimulator of melanin, produced by keratinocytes. The complex, by targeting keratinocytes, boosts whitening action by 15 times. A powerful combination of active whitening ingredients targets melanocytes to more effectively inhibit the source of melanin production and as a result, diminishes the skin's yellowish tone.
The image symbolically illustrates the technological prowess of advanced skin-whitening biotechnology; its ability to penetrate, fragment, colonize, and discipline the bodies of women. In this image, the fragmentation of women's bodies is symbolically illustrated by a beam of light shot through a tube. Upon penetrating the skin, this phallic beam of light produces a new "radiant," white face.
In this powerful visually fragmenting technology, the symbolic order of masculinist technology and the aesthetics of white supremacy are rendered as flesh in the "flawless", perfectly whitened and fragmented face of a woman of colour.
In this context, the aggressive world-wide marketing of skin-whitening commodities can be legitimated as benevolent 'cures' designed to transform and transcend the "dark" "diseased," bodies of women of colour. Ironically, not all women of colour can afford the "radiant" whitened faces this technology promises. The following is a price list for L'Oreal's Blanc Expert line. As I indicated earlier, this particular skin-whitening brand name is aggressively promoted to Asian women. Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx Blacc Expert Advanced Whitening Spot Corrector (30 ml= $125 US), Blanc Expert Mela-NO Cx Supreme Whitening Spot Corrector (30ml= $100 US ), Blanc Expert Advanced Whitening & Anti-Dark Circles Eye (100ml= $ 77 US), Blanc Expert Mela NO Cx Advanced Whitening Night Renovator (100ml= $ 83 US). This one has the 'cutest' and the most ironic name: Blanc Expert Mela-No Cx UV Expert Extra Large Double Protection SPF 50/PA+++ (30 ml= $59 US).
This list clearly demonstrates two important points: that these products are highly expensive and that they contain relatively small amounts of skin-whitening products. There is a common joke in Africa to describe the practice of face whitening: "Fanta Faces & Coca Cola Bodies." Fanta, in this context, refers to the orange colour of a soft drink. The dark colour of the Coke soft drink in contrast refers to the unbleached bodies of African women. This analogy is particularly apt because, like skin-bleaching cosmetics, Coca Cola and Fanta soft drinks are western products which are extensively marketed in Africa.
In its broadest sense, skin-whitening as 'anti-aging therapy' aims at intervening, 'halting' and if possible, 'reversing' the aging processes of mainly white women. I have suggested earlier that advertisements for skin-whitening products which are marketed to white women often use language suffused with the racialization of the aging processes of white women and the biomedicalization of women of colour's skin tones.
In this market, the paradigmatic face against which both women of colour and middle aged white women must be appraised, and ultimately found wanting, is the 'smooth/ radiant/youthful-looking' white face unmarked by age, labour or class. This technologically-produced 'radiant,' 'age-spot-free,' 'pigmentation-free' young-looking white face is now the universal standard for the "beautiful" face.
The cover of the 2002 L'Oreal Annual Report underscores the emergence of the "smooth". 'radiant', technologically produced, "air brushed" white face. In this image, a female with exceedingly blue eyes and perfectly white skin gazes vacantly. Her face shows no hint of life or emotions. This image is simultaneously as frightening as it is ambiguous. It is difficult to tell whether we are confronting a computer-generated animation or an image of an actual woman. This ambiguity is not innocent. The image at once suggests the corporeal possibility of a perfectly white skin and also whiteness as an abstract aesthetics. The ambiguity of the corporeality of this image can be read as an ironic comment on the image itself. In this reading, this computer-generated visual simulacrum recuperates the exclusionary aesthetics of whiteness.
L'Oreal has also developed other powerful tools which are designed to monitor the states of women's skin and bodies. One instrument of surveillance is a silicon-based semiconductor sensory device called SkinChip®. First developed for biometric fingerprinting ID and related surveillance technologies, this technology has now been adapted as a 'diagnostic' tool designed to monitor changes in the 'interiors' of women's skin such as "pigmentation" and "hydration" levels and other 'pathological' signs. Monitoring the "interior" of women's skin to gauge their "pigmentation" status has the potential to usher in a new and sinter form of eugenicist white supremacist aesthetics. The fact that SkinChip has been imported from biometric surveillance technology is not insignificant.
Surveillance technologies such as SkinChip also reinforce the aesthetics of white supremacy and the global expansion of skin-whitening as a capitalist commodity. L'Oreal is currently developing a personal-size version of the SkinChip device so that women can regularly monitor what is happening "inside" their bodies and on their skins.
I hope that I have demonstrated that the emerging skin-whitening industry is a lucrative globalized economic enterprise with profound social and political implications. L'Oreal's advertising for skin-whitening commodities reinforces and consolidates the globalized ideology of white supremacy and the sexist practice of the biomedicialization of women's bodies. It is in this specific context of the continuum of the western practice of global racism and the economic practice of commodity racism that the social, political and cultural implications of skin-whitening must be located and resisted. Consequently, feminist/antiracist and anti-colonial responses must confront this social phenomenon as part and parcel of our old enemy, the "civilising mission" ; the violent moral prerogative to cleanse and purify the mind and bodies of the "dark/dirt/savage". On March 10, 2004, two weeks prior to the American invasion of Iraq, Time magazine's cover featured the former Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. The caption reads: "Life After Saddam: an inside look at Bush's high-risk plan to occupy Iraq and remake the Middle East" . Hussein's face is painted white by a white man wearing a white casual shirt with matching casual white pants and a white baseball hat using a white paint brush. The colour of the dictrator's unpainted skin looks exceedingly black and menacing. The lower half of the dictator's face and neck are riddled with bullet holes.
Amina Mire is at the University of Toronto and can be reached at amina.mire@utoronto.com |
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