Yet another random tip.

[randomness]

In China, you should examine the sunscreen products carefully before you buy them. Available sunscreen often includes skin lightening additives. That's probably not what you want.

I noticed this while I was looking along the drugstore shelves for dry skin cream*. (Watsons, CapitaRetail Mall, Xizhimen.)

Another reported problem is that many local brands don't work, but that's a general problem with products in China.

*Also, you'll need plenty of moisturizer for Beijing. The city is dry, dry, dry: particularly in winter, but also early spring, late fall, etc.

Comments

[mangosteen]

Another reported problem is that many local brands don't work, but that's a general problem with products in China.

I'm sure that the combination of issues behind that is complex, but can you give some insight as to why that happens?

[eac.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I always wanted to be more goth. But the heads up is very good, thanks. :)

[eac.livejournal.com]

And of course the view into the whole skin tone angst is disturbing...

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Do they contain sunscreen AND skin lighteners, or skin lighteners instead of sunscreen?

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, no. They're actually responding to market demand. The labels do say quite clearly that they include skin lightener; it's a marketing point.

There are a lot of people in Asia (and in other places, for that matter) who desire lighter skin. Sunblock is sold in that context, and not as much for its sunburn preventing properties. Although people are becoming more concerned with skin cancer nowadays, sunburn isn't as great a concern as it is for people who start out with very light skin.

Personally, I think skin lightener is scary stuff, but I'm not an Asian female--and I'm also relatively light-skinned, and thus have some privilege there as well--and so I'm not being driven by the same social pressures to keep my skin light that Asian women often are.

Although I do appreciate having a parasol on sunny days. Even if I look funny carrying one (which I do; men aren't supposed to.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

It is, yeah.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

:) You can never be too light, right?

But yeah, I may not have looked hard enough for sunblock without lightener, so it may be around. Selection may be wider during the summer months.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

And, not instead of. It's right on the label. "SPF blah, with special skin whitening additives", etc.

[eac.livejournal.com]

:/

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

"It's complicated." :)

For one thing, you have no effective consumer protection organization. You also don't have the civil society that would create and demand such an organization. The Party tends to consider non-Party organizations anti-Party organizations. (One of the leaders of the parents protesting the tainted milk scandal was jailed for his efforts, for example.) This makes accountability rather hit or miss.

Producers moreover tend to value short-term advantage over long-term considerations; this is a country where government policy cannot be relied upon and is in any case deliberately obscure. People in general tend to seek immediate profit because planning for the long-term can so easily be upset, and corporate actors share this tendency.

Also, there are a lot of counterfeits on the market, and there's no pretense of efficacy whatsoever with a counterfeit. It's easy to fake packaging and put some (at best) innocuous compound inside the bottle, and it results in quick profits and damage to a brand you don't own.

I tend to feel that what happens with products in China is a natural result of local conditions, and that won't change until conditions change.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I'm sure it was hot and muggy in August! The summers are nasty.

Winter straight through April, though, it's dry enough that I have serious dry skin problems.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

And you can add: very little consumer protection regulation by the government, and little effective remedy through lawsuits.

Interesting. The actual answer is "anarchy"; there is no "The System" to enforce good behavior on manufacturers.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I remember years ago a woman who had done Peace Corps work in sub-Saharan Africa. She mentioned that she would sun herself to get a tan; the locals would use skin whiteners. But as someone noted, "In any case, the constant characteristic of the 'beautiful' figure is this: it's rare, and it's difficult and expensive to attain."

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Also take a gas mask! The day after I left (Nov. 2011), the US embassy reported the air quality as "wicked bad".

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

This kind of thing is how we got the FDA. It boggles my mind when I hear any of our fellow Americans talk about wanting to deregulate or to get rid of the FDA.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it anarchy so much as a system organized without any great concern for the individual. Lack of protection for consumers is just one of many manifestations of that unconcern.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

There is that, but there's the additional problem that there's no equivalent of Consumers Union there, and the government isn't particularly happy with the idea of popular organizing not under their control.

It's interesting in this context that Consumers Union is thinking about expanding into China. I don't know how that's going to go, given that they will be stepping on a lot of powerful toes if they do any serious investigating.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Hah! Definitely. (Although I assume you mean last November.)

Have you heard about the @BeijingAir Twitter feed? Every hour it reports the air quality conditions...as it turns out, from the top of the US Embassy building.

It's become rather controversial, as it provides data the Beijing authorities won't. James Fallows has three blog posts about it in The Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/air-emergency-beijing/247642/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/more-on-beijing-air-and-your-us-tax-dollars-at-work/247812/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/11/in-china-time-is-not-ripe-for-honest-air-pollution-readings/247817/

I'm vaguely amused that my tax dollars are going to pay for an air pollution monitoring station in Beijing. Let's see how long that lasts.

All that having been said I was apparently very lucky because the air was clear enough when I was there last that you could even see the mountains in the distance from the 10th floor balcony of my friends' place. But even my friends said that was remarkable.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Oh, and as for the "wicked bad" reading, I think all those years of living in Boston may have influenced your memory. As the LA Times reported:

The measurements drew widespread attention last November, the first time a reading for fine particulate matter went above 500 micrograms per cubic meter, about seven times the U.S. standard for "acceptable" air quality.

The embassy ended up reporting that off-the-charts reading as "crazy bad." (Embassy officials say a computer programmer with a sense of humor embedded the language in the program linking the monitor to Twitter without realizing it would ever get used.)

The embassy quickly deleted the tweet and replaced it with "beyond index," but the fanciful description stuck in the imagination.

Those wacky programmers!

[digitalemur.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I sort of see how that might work. If one doesn't burn as easily, but one wants to keep one's skin light, SPF + lightening agents is an attractive product. There's a way larger bunch of those folks in the market for sunscreen in China than in the US for instance.

I feel like I know multiple Asian folks who tan heavily and deeply quite easily when they go out in the sun, compared to me and my central European skin that burns and doesn't ever get very dark. I sort of see how it's a really noticeable effect, for many Asian folks. And in a culture where many, many people were farmers a generation or two ago, well, tanning isn't the status symbol it has become in white Western cultures.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I think all those years of living in Boston may have influenced your memory.

Sad, but true. I checked, but even the Globe got it correctly. But there's nothing so Boston as cultural parochialism!

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

Well, it doesn't protect businesses either. What there isn't much of in China is a rule of law over commercial activities.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

It boggles my mind when I hear any of our fellow Americans talk about wanting to ... get rid of the FDA.

It's one of those cases where the regulatory power of the State works so well that we forget why we installed it in the first place -- Hey, I haven't seen any problems, why do we need all this bureaucracy?

Somewhat similar was the itch by techies for libertarian politics in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, if you're life has run smoothly from suburbia to a good college and into a well-paying tech job, you're not going to see the value of police, welfare systems, etc. The tech downturn of 2001 raised their sympathy for the welfare state. (Remember the "Declaration of the Independce of Cyberspace"?)

Or the general view instilled by good colleges that people are well-meaning toward each other, because between growing up in good suburbs and a college life (where threatening people were diligently weeded out), people don't learn about the harsh parts of life.

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

You can never be too light, right?

You're forgetting the era of tanning. AFAIK, it started some time after WW I (at least in France), and only went out of fashion in the last decade due to the drumbeat of skin cancer warnings.

Of course, the driving force was urbanization: Once lots of poorish people worked in offices, the ability to spend time in the sun tanning became a sign of affluence.

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

I'll shorten that for you:

What there isn't much of in China is a rule of law