By Mar-Vic Cagurangan
Variety News Staff

I have a fairly dark complexion and a funny Filipino nose. In the Filipinos’ standard of beauty, I fall in the category of “not beautiful,” of which I was reminded when I went home for vacation last month. “They don’t sell Likas Papaya in Guam?” my relatives asked me, feeling sorry for my normal melanin production.
In the Philippines, skin-whitening products and cosmetic surgeries are major industries. The local media is abound with ridiculous ads suggesting that if you are dark-skinned, you’re hopelessly ugly. Men will not give you a second look and therefore you should shoot yourself.
One TV commercial shows a lonely dark-skinned girl who discovers the miracle of the skin whitening lotion. In the following scene, she’s as white as the White Lady of Maina Bridge, and miraculously, she can speak Spanish. The lotion gives her the power to speak the language spoken by the Filipino ilustrados. If you want your life to change forever, you should use skin whiteners. With a fair skin, you can pass for a rich man’s daughter and you can marry a handsome man from a rich family.
Ridiculous as they may seem, the power of marketing and the tyranny of the fashion world have been successful in setting an aesthetic convention. Slim is beautiful, hence the epidemic of eating disorders. These tyrants pressure women to conform and try to kill the self-esteem of those who rebel against the beauty convention.
Dove is using its own marketing power by launching the “real beauty” campaign. It has engaged a new group of “real” women to chip away at the restrictive and unrealistic images of beauty served up by rival firms. One woman is heavily freckled, another shows off a prominent scar, a third sports tattoos and body piercing. The message is everyone can be beautiful.
One scholar notes that the question of beauty is disturbing because beauty itself is disturbing. Which explains the philosophers’ attraction to the discussion of this subject. “We have to understand beauty, or we will always be enslaved by it,” says psychologist Nancy Etcoff, author of “Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty.”
But there is no “supposed to be” in bodies, according to Clarissa Pinkola Estes from Women Who Run with the Wolves. “The question is not size of shape or years of age, or even having two of everything for some do not. But the wild issue is, does this body feel, does it have right connection to pleasure, to heart, to soul, to the wild? Does it have happiness, joy? Can it in its own way move, dance, jiggle, sway, thrust? Nothing else matters.”
Physical beauty is partly a genetic lottery and partly a science project. Other aspects of beauty — the ones that appeal to the intellect and emotion — are achieved by hard work. That’s why they should count more. You’ll find that tonight at the Miss Inner Beauty pageant launched by Sorensen Pacific Broadcasting, coinciding with the season finale of the popular TV series “Ugly Betty.” Five candidates will be hidden behind the screen and asked questions. The judges will decide on the winners based on the candidates’ answers.
“The objective of the pageant,” according to SPB’s Joyce Krauss, “is to show that there’s lot of beauty with inner beauty. It’s more about being kind, being honest and passionate.”
Who cares about Likas Papaya? Who cares about not looking like Cindy Crawford? Get spunky! Get cerebral! Get witty! Go Ugly Betty!