The Manipulation of Beauty

If you’re brown, you wish to be redhead. If you have black hair, you wish to be blond. If you have blue eyes, you wish to have brown ones. If you are fat, you wish to be thin. If you are small you wish to be tall. If you are tall you wish to be average... And the list never ends.

And the concept of marketing and numerous business segments show us that it is a naive thought that maybe at some point, we might start growing out of this and begin to accept ourselves. That perhaps e.g. at around the age of 18, we may begin to think that it’s ok to be the way we actually are.

In Europe it didn’t hit me this hard. Maybe because I had already been too used to the sight of it, or maybe because there is some diversity there. And maybe because of this diversity, I found some resemblance with a small segment of the reality. Or maybe because I had simply been blind.

But here! Wow, it hits hard! Because what you see on the streets, is so extremely far from what you come across in the commercials. Take the peluquerias (hairdresser) for instance. Blonds and whites. Maybe black-hair but with a snow-white skin. Not a single picture of an indigenous person! Go to the cinema, watch tv! The happy, comfortable-life-leading, yoghurt drinking-, healthy-eating- character is a pure white.

Oh wait, how can I be so shallow, hiding a huge part of the truth?! How could I forget to mention the appearance of the indigenous people on screen commercials?! Because they do appear. They are the servants. They are the ones behind the cashiers or the delivery guys and girls in a grocery-sore-chain company’s commercial. They are the ones taking orders and serving the whites with pop-corns in the cinema-chain advert.

And when did colonization happen? How long does social change take? One minute? Or one millennium? 

Long live equality!