Skin Deep

I have quite a few girly weaknesses: shoes, handbags, boys who tell me I'm pretty... But as I get older, I find myself spending more money on something that directly feeds into my vanity: skin care.

A trip to Sephora could easily take a couple of hours. The store used to be overwhelming to me, but with the help of a good friend who used to work there (and who is an Asian girl with radiant skin), I got a start in figuring out which product lines are my favorite. (Caudalie, DDF, and Philosophy) I now thoroughly enjoy going up and down the aisles, testing out the countless cremes, scrubs, and sprays. I am perfectly aware that teams of people are being paid a whole lot of money to sucker me into shelling out $48 for 1.7 ounces of anti-aging eye cream with "biospheric complex," but somehow I keep coming back and adding more to my arsenal of glycolic acid, aloe vera, willow bark, grape water, and who knows what else. I've even convinced myself that all of this stuff really works.

Maybe it does. I will say that my skin is pretty nice. I rarely get any acne (though this particularly stressful month has been an exception, which explains my most recent Sephora splurge), and I have yet to develop crow's feet around my eyes. But that probably has more to do with genetics than anything I'm spending money on. Plus, as I'm constantly being told, Asian women just naturally age better. Ha.

I think that the notion that Asian women look young has more to do with projected assumptions about Asian femininity than anything actual about how they age. But still, there is definitely a special relationship that Asian women have with their skin care. (And because I like to blame a lot of things about myself on the fact that I'm Asian, I'm going to say that this is the root of my newfound weakness.) I have very early memories of the older women in my family marveling at my fair complexion. (Having grown up in a country where people prefer to be tan, I never understood this.) My mother didn't allow me to wear makeup when I was a teenager, but she always reminded me to wear sunscreen. (With my sun spots and freckles, I now wish I was better about listening to her.) I've often witnessed my aunt (who looks at least 15 years younger than her age) going to the cosmetics counters at Macy's and selecting her favorite top-shelf face cremes. (That was one thing she never hesitated to pay full price for.) Just as I grew up aware that my family eats rice for dinner every day, I grew up aware that women need to take care of their skin.

I'm sure this isn't an Asian-specific experience. All women, regardless of ethnicity, are pressured to preserve their youthful looks. That's why we have a multi-billion dollar beauty industry. But one thing I've noticed is there is this pervasive idea that Asian skin is different from any other kind, and that Asian countries somehow hold the secrets to beautiful skin. A google search for "Asian skin care" pulls up loads of articles like THIS ONE, which declares, "It is not an accident that Japanese women have beautiful skin." Other Asian folks also seem to believe that the Japanese know skin care best. When I went to Japan with my family, among the things that the Chinese tour tried to trap us into buying were sake, kimonos, and skin care products. I once went to Sephora with a group of friends (one Chinese, one Vietnamese, one half Chinese/half Japanese), and the sales girl (who was white) recommended a product line, Boscia, specifically because it's made in Japan, where, she claimed, the quality standards are way stricter than in the U.S. (We nodded and sighed, "Ahh...")

So maybe there's a sociological study that could be done about Asian women and skin care. (Actually, I'm sure there's been one already.) Chris Rock's documentary, Good Hair, investigates the relationship that African American women have with their hair: the time and money they spend on it, the industry that's built around it, the notions of beauty that it reflects and perpetuates. In a writing class I used to teach, I assigned an essay by bell hooks called "Straightening our Hair," which argues that while the practice of hair straightening is clearly a product of internalized white supremacy, it has also become a sort of cultural heritage and form of bonding among black women: a heritage that gets dismantled when the practice gets removed from the kitchens in black households to the shelves of white corporations. A film about Asian women and skin could feature different, but still related, social issues. It could raise the question of whether skin care products are marketed to Asian women in a way that reflects either Orientalist notions of beauty or white notions of beauty. (At the same time that Asian women often pride themselves for their Asian skin, there's also a huge market for skin whitening products in Asia.) The film could also trace ad campaigns of cosmetic companies like Shiseido and dissect their cultural implications. The pic above is a vintage ad from Shiseido, a Japanese company, that targets Chinese women but depicts a white woman in its picture. The film could even try to take a scientific angle and investigate whether there's any truth to the idea that Asian genes or Asian cultural habits hold the secrets to good skin.

I might just have to get on this project.