Race storm over Thai skin whitening ad
Print Edition
A THAI company pulled an advert for skin lightening pills yesterday following an outcry on social media over a product sold with the tagline “white makes you a winner.”
It is the latest marketing gaffe to draw accusations of racism in a kingdom obsessed with skin color.
The advertisement for Seoul Secret’s “snowz” supplement pills featured a veteran Thai celebrity attributing her professional success to her pale complexion.
“It’s not easy to stay at this point for a long time,” the 35-year-old Thai model and actress, Cris Horwang, says in the video. “If I stopped taking care of my body and white complexion, all that I have invested will be gone.”
The model is then shown in black make-up, casting an envious look at a second woman with light skin who appears by her side.
“A newcomer will replace me and turn me into a dark star,” she says in the video, using a Thai idiom to refer to her fame fading.
Whitening creams and pills are wildly popular in Thailand, where pale skin is upheld as the standard of beauty in the media and among many Thais who comment freely on the complexion of others.
Advertisements for the products are standard fare on billboards and TV spots, but some companies have faced a backlash in recent years for going too far.
Before its removal yesterday, the Seoul Secret video received more than 100,000 views on YouTube, as well as enquiries on the company’s Facebook page about how to order the product.
But other social media sites drew posts railing against the advert for being racially offensive and reinforcing the country’s narrow beauty ideals. “It indicates that dark skin people are losers, and this is clearly racist,” a Thai commentator named Tammaijang wrote on a web forum.
The skincare company issued an apology, saying in a statement that it did not intend “to convey discriminatory or racist messages.”
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