The Most beautified Women in the World
Beauty is big business in the
philippines. Endless beauty contests, fashion shows, and pages of ads for every imaginable kind of beauty products readily attest to this fact. Both large, foreign, firms from the United States, Japan, and Western Europe and small, local entreprenuers find the Filipina a willing customer for any preparation or service that guarantees beauty.
Colonial standards of beauty dictate that white is beautiful. Nora Aunor (actress) was a sensation beacuse she was the first woman to make it big who not tall, willowy, and fair, with high-bridged niose. Who decided that a
Caucasian nose was good while a Malay nose was not? Not the Filipinos, but their white Spanish conquerors. After of years of Spanish rule in the
philippines, a hierarchy of beauty evolved which exactly mirrored the rigid structure of Philippine society under the Spanish. Pure Caucasian looks were on top, then mestizo features, and at the bottom of the heap, the pure Asian, Filipino, and Chinese.
The Americans, who arrived with their hollywood cinema queens and the beauty business, merely reinforced those colonial standards, making ''true'' beauty an impossible dream, but offering halfway steps towards the goal. To the mess of feudal and colonial concepts about beauty, the Americans added their own neurosis: the absolute terror of old age , a tragic by-product of highly industrialized and fragmented western society.
Sadly, the middle upper classes in the Philippines have adopted this American obsession with youth. The result is a class of women madly striving to look caucasian and as young as possible.