**Please excuse me while I preach from my soapbox for this post.**

Social beauty standards are strange if you really think about them.  And dangerous too.  In Asian countries, white skin is considered beautiful because they associate tans with lower class field workers.  To achieve a porcelain physique, girls use unsafe and illegal products to bleach the color from their skin, despite the risk of permanent and disfiguring results. Doesn’t that sound crazy? Well, we’re crazy over here too.

In Western culture, tanned skin is considered beautiful. Since the days of Coco Chanel, a “healthy glow” was seen as the side effect of living a luxurious and leisurely lifestyle despite the fact that sun damage causes wrinkles, sunspots, and cancer.  We participate in a $5 billion tanning industry and purposefully expose our skin to carcinogens from tanning beds.

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