The Concept Of Beauty

I have read an interesting article in kompas few months ago. It has opened my mind, because the issue was extraordinary and it did happen in our society. I get the point of the article that “Most of women in Indonesia want to have white skin”. The most interesting part was when many people did not realize the big impact of this issue. In my opinion, loosing identity became the big impact. I would like to give some comments about the article in the next paragraph.

“Most of women in Indonesia want to have a white skin”, yes I think that’s true and really happened!!!. Thats all because many advertisement have created the concept of beauty in our mind. It told us that beauty is white.

Advertisement is one of many ways to promote and create your opinion, brand, company, etc. We could see that most of advertisement told that women would look beautiful because of their white skin, most of them implied that. Most of the ad of soap, lotion, and cream said how to have a white skin, because white skin will makes you more beautiful and then everyone will love you.

In similar ways, we also see that most advertisement in the television use white women as their model, and also in some ads there are some boys whom interviewed about how’s the beautiful women looked like, its all the same white skin.

Honestly, I felt so sad to hear that. It is loosing our identity,because most of Indonesian women have brown skin. I think it could be included as orientalism or even post colonialism. Indonesia used to be colonized country, but we still feel the impact of it until now. Most of us feel inferior about western because they have white skin. So that, it becomes a doctrine in our minds or brainwashing and the characteristic of beauty becomes one subject, white skin. Beside that, it becomes a way of contrasting us, western versus eastern.

On the contrary, most of western amazed our skin, brown skin. Actually, they wanted to have a skin just like us. They said that our brown skin is awesome and beautiful. They tried to bask in order to make their skin brown.

After all, we should proud of our original skin, and should not sad with that. Because white skin does not always deal with beauty. It according to us in regarding ourselves. Beauty is in our mind not in other people perspective.

Posted by Laili Azizah -0608243-