back around 1910-20, my grandmother would do farmwork like chopping cotton with long, opaque socks pulled up over her arms and always wore a poke bonnet lest a little sun get to her and mar her pale skin. She never had much pigment anyway, but she was considered lucky to have pale and freckle-free skin....
Don't know what the fascination with milk white skin is in the northern hemisphere is...but it goes around the globe, not just Europe and north America, but even Japan. Every country where this is a truth had potions and lotions to bleach out skin, and if that didn't work, well, there was always paint.
It means you're not from the working class/have servants to do the work for you. Tans didn't catch on as the "thing to have" among the leisure set until the last century.
Personally, I think that having clear, glowing, unblemished skin is ideal regardless of skin tone or color, but that's just me. :/
There's some kind of double-whammy bleach'n'lasers thing that girls in India have. MUST BE PALE! Meanwhile in Britain, hoardes of women cover themselves in lotions to appear orange. Most peculiar.
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Date: 2010-03-03 04:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 02:22 am (UTC)And then when i disrobe, i'll have this snow-white face floating over my 'dull dark' body.
Too freakin' weird.
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Date: 2010-03-03 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 03:23 am (UTC)Don't know what the fascination with milk white skin is in the northern hemisphere is...but it goes around the globe, not just Europe and north America, but even Japan. Every country where this is a truth had potions and lotions to bleach out skin, and if that didn't work, well, there was always paint.
Bleh.
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Date: 2010-03-03 03:44 am (UTC)Personally, I think that having clear, glowing, unblemished skin is ideal regardless of skin tone or color, but that's just me. :/
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Date: 2010-03-03 03:39 am (UTC)Different era, yeah, but still major fail.
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Date: 2010-03-03 04:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 05:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 02:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 09:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-03 02:32 pm (UTC)