By Youngchi Chang
youngchi_chang@yahoo.com


Summer is coming. You may be busy working out everyday to lose weight so you can wear the sexy bikini you bought at the Victoria’s Secret clearance sale after Christmas.

There is one more thing you might need to do: get a tan.
One day, my friend, Kelly, asked me to go to the tanning salon in town. She was envious of my darker skin and thought tanned skin of her own would make her look more sexy and healthy.
Like Kelly, many of girls in the States, especially white girls, want to get tans, like it’s a pre-summer essential.

I wasn’t really interested in the tanning salon so she had to go alone. And it looks like she will be going back quite a bit after buying a $150 package for 10 additional tanning sessions.
I used to hate myself having dark skin. If I had the money Kelly spent for the tans, I would have spent it for a whitening cream.
I always bought sun block creams even before summer started. I tried not to go out, but when I had to I always wore a hat or something to cover my face from the sun.

I devoted myself to reading magazines and surfing the Internet for tips on getting whiter skin. I even tried many natural ingredient massages with cucumber, potato, green tea and milk.
For milky skin, many women in Asia invest their money to buy whitening cream for skin and go to beauty shops to get massages from professionals.

A market-analysis company based in England, Euromonitor International Inc., estimates that the skin-care market in the Asia-Pacific region topped $11 billion in 2001. And, skin whitening products make up the largest portion of that market.

In the United States and Canada, the tanning businesses have appreciably grown in the last 25 years and are still increasing.
According to the American Academy of Dermatology’s research in 2005, an estimated 365 billion trips are made to tanning salons each year.
Americans seem pretty attached to indoor tanning salons. So, it might be strange for such Americans to understand the efforts of the Asian to have paler skin.

In my teenage years, just like any other girl, I wanted to be a beautiful like the women on TV that had pale and clear skin, and boys falling in love with them. I only saw dark skin as getting in the way.
Then, one day I asked myself: ‘Why do I need to spend so much energy thinking about my looks?’

Then when I was standing in front of the mirror, and watched myself for quite some time, I couldn’t find satisfactory answer.
So I smiled and realized it was a stupid question.

Suddenly, I thought I was beautiful, smiling at myself. And finally, I got the answer.
The beauty was not on my face, it was inside of me.