How Cultures and Humans Differ Over Cosmetics

The summer is over and shops all around the nation are slashing down the prices of summer cosmetics and toiletries to unbelievable prices. People are stocking up their sun tan cream for next year so that they don’t have to face massive double digit numbers of cosmetics and toiletries shopping.

I remember last year’s pre-summer months when I was stocking up my sun tan cream bottles for this year’s summer. And trust me, I haven’t finished using those bottles yet so they’ll probably last me the next summer too.

But why am I saying this?

Along with the summer cosmetics, another popular product is tanning lotion or tanning sprays. Every one wants to look the beach queen when they are off on holiday and who ever said no to a bit of holiday glamour? Although tanning products are used year round, I did see loads of prices on tanning products getting reduced. Well, tanning products aside, just recently I had been to the local Asian shop in East London.

My mother went to get some packets of spices and I was just left in the shop looking around. I grabbed myself a bottle of water, paid for it and took a gulp and went exploring round the shop. Just when I went looking around, I came across a queer little cosmetic product which was a fairness cream for Asian skin. It was a tube of cream that would brighten up the face by moisturising it and claimed to lighten the skin.

Being Asian (Indian) myself, it seemed quite interesting because compared to my sister, I am slightly darker and buying this product seemed a good prospect. I bought it and tried it out. I can’t really tell the difference but I can reveal it is working slowly but steadily because my skin feels a lot plumper and smoother.

But why am I saying this?

Today, I went to the shops and looked around in the cosmetics section to find the reduced prices of tanning products and immediately I wondered – living in a European country, a lot of the people here want to be darker, but when I stepped into the Asian shop, for the Asian people, they wanted to be lighter. Is the grass on the other side always green?

Should cultures differ so much that one side of the world is interested in their beauty by turning a nice brown where as the other side of the world is interested in their beauty by turning a sallow or olive like colour? I know I don’t want to use any tanning products because I’m brown as it is and I do like using the fairness cream even though I don’t know if it works.

Cultures differ so much even on something as negligible as cosmetics and I’m left here wondering how the world actually functions. But then, I guess that’s what makes the world the world we live in today that it is combined with a set of different ideas and notions and in some ways, it might be a good thing that there are so many cultures in the world.

Fair enough the grass on the other side is always greener but maybe that’s what makes us human. I know that cosmetics is a really silly example but take a while to think how two products, in the same place can be so different in their function. Cultures really do differ and do us as people…