The other ironic thing is the report “Pigmentation and Empire: The Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry for an eye-opening look at the extremes some will go to in order to lighten their skin — often with disastrous results.” because white people risk death by melanoma to obtain darker skin.

Furthermore being a read head and fair-skinned, I had to deal with my fair share of “ginger” jokes.

It often has a lot to do with what or who else is in the picture. If you have a dark-skinned and a light-skinned person standing together, you have to try and come up with a middle-range lighting that may end up pushing both of their skin tones towards an extreme (ie the dark-skinned person will look darker and the light-skinned person will look lighter).

A huge amount of work has to go into lighting people in such a way that the camera can pick up the facial expressions that you would easily see if the person was right in front of you. Cameras are tricksy little buggers.

Which in turn explains why pale Europeans often want to tan. These days, pallor comes from being at a desk job for long hours; only those with leisure time can bake their skin, ergo a white person’s tan means wealth and power unless it takes the form of tan line’s where a worker’s skin is exposed, i.e. red-neck.

A similar situation for having a fit physique versus being, well, fatter. When most of the population consists of farmers and other manual labourers, the only people who can afford sufficient food and have the leisure time not to burn it off are the upper classes.

Like tanning, this is reversed now because people doing hard physical labour in Western countries make up a much smaller percentage of the population.

The lightness of darkskinned people on Magazine covers come from three sources. All somewhat the product of bias.

1) Makeup (Necessary in front of the strong photo/studio lights)
2) Studio and Film Lights. Camera’s need a lot of light.
3) Photo-editing

As a good example of this, you can look at pictures of Tyra Banks. In various images her skin tone is all over the map, from fairly dark to almost Caucasian.

Generally speaking, with the widespread adoption of Photoshop, magazine covers are probably the last place you want to look to see what someone actually looks like. Aside from the Dove (I think) commercial that you can see online showing a model from arriving in studio to the finished product, which looks nothing like her, there are assorted artists websites out there showing the before and after work they’ve done for print magazines.

Light skin preference seems to come from a combination of middle class or better status (if you aren’t working outdoors, you can be paler) and status in terms of looking more like the ruling elite.

Which in turn explains why pale Europeans often want to tan. These days, pallor comes from being at a desk job for long hours; only those with leisure time can bake their skin, ergo a white person’s tan means wealth and power unless it takes the form of tan line’s where a worker’s skin is exposed, i.e. red-neck.

But it’s hard to understand how a DJ could NOT foresee causing offense with a light-skinned blacks theme.

Actually, it’s the one thing here that really creeps me out–the fact that just by walking around with my blond hair and white skin I’m the living embodiment of an unattainable standard. And of course the Chinese women in print ads are all much paler than average (and there are a disproportionate amount of ads featuring white women), and a huge percentage of skin care products have whitening agents in them. I’m actually wondering what I’ll do when the face cream I brought from the States runs out–god knows I need what little melanin I have!

1) Makeup (Necessary in front of the strong photo/studio lights)
2) Studio and Film Lights. Camera’s need a lot of light.
3) Photo-editing

it suddently hits me that all the people pictured on the covers of the black-interest magazines (e.g., Essence, Ebony, Today’s Black Woman, etc.) are way way lighter-skinned than just about all the black people I’m seeing in my near vicinity

Similarly, the Bollywood stars are way lighter than just about all of the Indo-Pak people I know. Where do they come from?