Real Fake Skin

Skin lightening is a global industry that claims to transform skin as a way to transform persons. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and skincare advertisements in the Philippines, this paper considers how the skin is drawn into semiotic frameworks that rely on implicit ideological links between race and nation by a capitalist modernity that disciplines a desire for com-modified emblems of class distinction. Skin qualities become linked to race (e.g., "light" and "dark" skin tones) and age (e.g., "smooth" and "rough" skin textures), combining a desire for skin lightening with an anxiety about skin aging. Within this racial and temporal framing, lightening and aging apply not only to the skin but also to the nation, as the Philippines grapples with the seemingly competing pulls of Western modernity and postcolonial sovereignty. Reconstituted as desirable past and desirable future, "whiteness" is harnessed by skin lightening advertising to promise "light modern juvenescence" in a manner that allows persons and nations to remain real, not become fake. Consumers are thus recruited not as striving fakes, but as modern subjects who have moved beyond whiteness as colonial desire for racial Europeanness, and toward whiteness as cosmopolitan desire for youthfulness and modernity. This makes skin lightening no longer about becoming something you are not, but about fulfilling who you have always been

Aesthetics · Art · Colonialism · Epistemology · Framing (construction) · Ideology · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Semiotics · Sociology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Philosophy

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