Colour and Color: What Skin Tells Us About Aspiration

The historical logic of this is not difficult to trace and is worth tracing because it explains why the aspiration runs in the direction it does in each region. In Asia, and particularly in South and Southeast Asia, a tan has historically indicated outdoor labour, which is to say agricultural work, which is to say poverty. A person of means did not work in the fields. A person of means stayed indoors, managed others, maintained pale skin as evidence of their economic position. This is not a recent construction. It appears in Chinese classical literature, in the aesthetics of Mughal court painting, in the conventions of Japanese theatrical makeup, in the whitening powders worn by Vietnamese aristocratic women in the pre-colonial period. It predates Western influence by centuries, which complicates the narrative in which this preference is entirely a colonial import, though colonialism certainly reinforced and industrialised it in ways that made it more commercially exploitable.

In the West the logic inverted, and the inversion is also traceable historically. The tan as status symbol is largely a twentieth century development, generally attributed to Coco Chanel’s accidental sunburn on the Côte d’Azur in 1923 and the subsequent acceleration of fashion in the same direction: bronze skin came to signal leisure, which is to say holidays, which is to say the money and time required to take them. Where once a pale complexion indicated that you did not have to work outdoors, a tan came to indicate that you could afford to be outdoors without working. The aspiration simply updated to match the new economic conditions of a society where manufacturing and service work happened indoors, and outdoor leisure became the marker of disposable income rather than outdoor labour.

Two friends come to mind. One, of British background, uses tanning salons and self-tan in winter and seeks the sunniest spot on any beach she visits. The other, of Asian heritage, grew up with whitening agents in the bathroom and an awareness, absorbed rather than stated, that her natural colouring was further from the aspired point than she would like. They are both trying to be the other, in the specific direction that their respective cultural contexts have told them to try. Neither of them is unusual. Both of them are responding to a market that has identified their existing appearance as a problem it can sell a solution to, which is the underlying business model of most of the cosmetics industry regardless of geography.

Language works differently but produces some of the same observations. Travelling between countries where English is spoken as a second language, you learn quickly that American English is what was taught in schools and broadcast on television, which means that the English most people in Asia have encountered is not the English I grew up speaking. Words that I use naturally, trolley, chips, autumn, petrol, cinema, produce blank looks or amusement when I use them with people whose English vocabulary was built around shopping cart, fries, fall, gas, movie theater. Australia, meanwhile, contributes its own register: thongs for flip-flops, doona for duvet, bottleshop for off-licence, and the phrase CBD, central business district, which I thought I had last encountered in a GCSE geography exercise about Wombwell.

The word colour itself is one of the casualties of this divergence. The Latin original was color, which is the American spelling. The French, from whom English borrowed so much in the medieval period, wrote it as couleur, and English eventually settled on colour with the u, which is the spelling that Spellcheck in every piece of software I have ever used seems to regard as an eccentricity requiring correction. These are small things. They accumulate into something larger, which is the recognition that the version of the language you grew up speaking is local, not universal, and that the assumptions embedded in it are local too. Travel doesn’t give you better assumptions. It gives you awareness that you have them, which is the starting point for something more useful.