Why brown has become the new white

At the beginning of March 2019, Li Pink, a video blogger, opened an account on Bilibili, a popular Chinese video content provider similar to You-Tube, and released three videos on techniques of self-tanning. Li, a Shanghainese with a Northeast accent, calls herself the Dubai princess and Indian Belle. In particular she believes her tanning makeup gives her the maximum aesthetic pleasure.

Unkind souls have left malicious remarks under her video page that have set off cyber spats, such as: "Your voice is unpleasant, like a man's. Are you a ladyboy?" and "Have you had plastic surgery? Is this face real?" The attacks on her seem to boil down to the critics' consensus that she fails to meet their standards, not looking "feminine enough".

She knows the world of skin whitening well, she says, including its changing standards, and has got used to the taunts. What she does is all about "opening up aesthetically", she says, even if that means standing out in the crowd.

Becoming a different one in the crowd spawned a plethora of playful jokes about her, a marinated egg in soy sauce among hard-boiled white eggs, and for her it is just a difference in flavor. Since her first video, The Daily Makeup of Bilibi's No 1 Dark Skin Cool Girl, in February 2019, she has garnered 620,000 subscriptions.

For her, applying tanning makeup is a ceremony.

"Before you meet people in disguise you dare not give the show away in front of them, but after you break free of the constraints, many things in life will seem to be a lot more smooth."