Marketing For A Different Standard Of Beauty (Part I)

高圆圆(Gao Yuanyuan) Chinese actress/model

About two years ago, when I first arrived in Taiwan, I had the following conversation with a female Taiwanese colleague:

Me: “What did you do yesterday after work?”
Colleague: “I played basketball with my sister and lost so I had to buy her a douhua.” (Douhua is a light sweet soupy tofu snack that can be found all over Taiwan and in parts of mainland China).
“Do you know that the more white things you eat the whiter your skin will be? You shouldn’t eat black-colored foods because they will make your skin dark.”

While I was not about to take her opinion as representative of an overall consensus, I did begin to consciously observe advertisements in the Chinese media and I often spoke with Chinese friends about their idea of “beauty.”

What I found is the ideal beautiful Chinese woman:
1.    Is very slender
2.    Has wide circular eyes
3.    Has perfectly white skin.

As an American I found the third characteristic particularly intriguing. I grew up in a culture that strives for the perfect dark “healthy” tan. The second summertime hits in New England everyone grabs their tanning oil and goes straight to the beach. In China it’s the complete opposite. On sunny days women lather themselves with layers of sunscreen and walk around with umbrellas. It is one case where in the pursuit of beauty, women are actually protecting themselves against serious sun-related health issues.

But let’s get back to the relationship between food and skin tone and, more importantly, why this post relates to business in China. Companies use this image of the perfect beautiful woman to market their products. They try to trick Chinese consumers into believing that their product will make their skin as white as the woman on the package. Take Lulu for example. All of my female Chinese friends and coworkers drink Lulu brand almond milk. They are convinced that for each can of the silky white almond milk they drink, their skin will turn that much more white and beautiful. Check out the woman on the Lulu can in the image below:

I also found the following online conversation about Lulu almond milk on a Baidu message board:

A) MM常喝露露杏仁露真的对皮肤好吗？
I often drink Lulu, is it really good for my skin?
(MM=Chinese internet slang for a beautiful girl)
B) 经常喝会对皮肤好的~不要喝太多应该不会胖的~
Yes, drinking Lulu is good for your skin, but don’t drink too much or you’ll put on weight~

In fact when I typed the term “white skin” into Baidu Zhidao (a question answer forum similar to Yahoo Answers) I came up with about 20 pages of results, of women asking various questions about how to make their skin as white as possible.

There is a massive market for skin whitening products and beauty services in China which we will discuss further in this ongoing series of posts.