By Dory Carr Harris

Recently, our own fair U of T released a new and highly controversial study [PDF] that claims men (of all skin colours) are more attracted to women with lighter skin. The story was quickly snapped up by Jezebel, which tied the recent influx in the long-standing demand for “skin lightening creams” in India to the trend.
Dr. Shyon Baumann, a sociologist at the University, doesn’t go this far—he asserts that the preference for lighter-skinned individuals is tied to the underlying moral foundations of our society that dictate how women should comport themselves. Lighter is favourable because it brings to mind purity, innocence, virtue, and all the rest of those slightly antiquated values. Darkness, conversely, symbolizes passion, danger, and virility. It also follows therefore, according to the study, that women naturally have a heightened desire for men with darker complexions, just to keep things nice and balanced.
To reach these startling conclusions, Dr. Baumann began by analyzing more than 2,000 advertising photographs of both men and women and discovered that “the skin of white women was 15.2 per cent lighter than the skin of white males, and the skin of black women 11.1 per cent lighter than the skin of black men.” There’s no doubt that a majority of white female faces dominate the modelling industry, and if Baumann and his team say they’re 15.2% percent whiter than their male counterparts, we’re inclined to believe him. However it seems that his explanation for the “why” of this phenomenon is somewhat lacking.
Relating the issue simply to moral concerns seems rather narrow because it disregards the large role that social and economic class clearly play in this preference. It would seem the age-old image of the upper class women on the promenade with her parasol (necessary to preserve her pearly complexion from the destruction of the sun) is still running rampant. Recently, tanned skin has become more of a trend, causing white folks everywhere to expose their tender flesh to those golden rays. Yet, there is that nagging belief from the past how those with darker complexions were of a lower class and had achieved their swarthy skin from working outside in the elements. Pale skin was the mark of financial security and social success, and still is. This is arguably one of the reasons why women in India have been lightening their skin with bleaching creams for years.
Advertising is about selling products, and the best way to market a product is to make the consumer feel like they’re lacking something—something that can be attained by buying X. What better way to do this than to bombard the public with images of an ideal that has long been associated with wealth, success, and high society? It seems odd, or perhaps short-sighted, to base a moral argument on data from an industry that is fuelled, for the most part, by economic concerns, and not factor those concerns into the argument. Perhaps Baumann was convinced that our preference for Nicole Kidman’s frigid image would set an example for those of us who have fallen from grace.
Photo by saramax.