It’s not just in the Philippines, it’s practically all of the South East Asia and Oriental Asia. The Chinese favour lighter skin, and their climate ranges from tropical to almost Siberian; and Japanese geishas -once the archetypal image of Japanese beauty- wore make-up that made them completely white.
Basically, in the cultures of most of these Asian countries, darker skin is synonymous with a life outdoors, everything from farming to begging on the streets, and so dark skin is regarded as a sign of poverty. If you have a good job and a nice house, you typically spend a lot of your time inside and therefore you are shaded from the sun and don’t get much of a sun tan.
They also spend their money unwisely where their skin is concerned, whitening soaps, scrubs and lotions are sold in huge numbers but factor 50 sunblock is a bugger of a thing to find in Asian supermarkets and stores. My wife is Filipina and from a very poor, provincial background and she is just the same. I always tell her that if she’d wear sunblock of a sufficiently high factor, her face, arms and legs, which are almost always exposed, would be the same colour as the parts of her that only she and I ever see; but what do I know?!
We white westerners are the other way around, many of us live in climates where a sun tan is a hard thing to obtain and so for us, darker skin is a sign of sufficient wealth to travel to sunnier climes!
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