Should You Tan or Lighten Your Skin?

This is a reflection after a trip.

It began when I was traveling in Paphos, Cyprus, and met a Black woman from Denmark. We sat on beach chairs, sunbathing and chatting.

She said that in Denmark, dark skin is widely considered beautiful because a bronze complexion suggests that someone has the money and leisure to vacation by the sea. It is the same in France. When my colleagues return from vacation, they are delighted if someone says they look more bronzed (tan), and they even regret how quickly their skin turns pale again.

Besides sunbathing naturally, people can also tan artificially by visiting salons and using UV lamps. This has been around for a long time—I remember seeing it on Friends. In recent years, some people have become so obsessed that they have chosen injections to achieve a tan. She said that one of her male friends had gone to great lengths in this regard. He is now so tan that he looks Latino, yet he still has typically Nordic features, such as blond hair and blue eyes. Overall, the combination looks rather strange, and excessive tanning also increases the risk of skin cancer.

On the other hand, for most Asian and African communities, fair skin is still considered beautiful. Chinese culture has a saying that “fair skin conceals a hundred flaws,” while Korean cosmetics emphasize skin whitening. As for African women, my French friend told me that many of them use cosmetics with skin-lightening effects, even though these products cannot be purchased legally and are harmful to their health.

I could not help realizing that beauty truly is extremely subjective, and that different cultures or historical contexts can produce completely opposite conclusions.

For us, is it not a kind of good fortune to be able to encounter different standards of beauty up close? Only by learning about different standards of beauty will we truly begin to ask ourselves: What, to me, is beautiful?

What if we could step outside both of these frameworks of beauty—neither following the crowd in lightening our skin nor following the crowd in tanning it—and instead look at ourselves in the mirror and ask: Am I healthy? Do I think I am beautiful like this? Do I love myself like this?

I hope that, in each of your hearts, the answer is yes.