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This always annoys me. Indian beauty norms are not about wanting women to look white. It's not to do with that at all, they (in general obviously) favour the light-skinned-Indian look, not a white-as-in-Caucasian look.

Their culture around beauty and skin colour is no more 'troubling' than ours, it's exactly the same, but we favour tanning as opposed to lightening.

Now I think both are slightly troubling, we risk skin cancer to get darker skin through UV light, they risk similar problems through bleaching their skin to go lighter, but it needs to be highlighted that 'they' are not trying to look like 'us', any more than 'we' are trying to look like 'them'.

I hate the skin-whitening thing in east asia - it's the main selling point for beauty skin products in the same way that anti-wrinkle is here. It used to be true that it had nothing to do with wanting to be caucasian: white skin = no working in the fields = privilege and wealth (just as people here used to powder their faces pale/white). However, I don't think that's strictly true anymore. What about cosmetic eye surgery? To a minority (I'm sure it's still very much a minority) the aspirations of western culture have become conflated with aspiring to be western, and white at that.

I know nothing much about south asia though, just to be clear.

I was perhaps making too big a generalisation to lump the two together, but I sort of assumed that the skin-bleaching thing in India was part of a similar phenomenon to the 'caucasianising' surgery in South East Asia.

Also I wasn't trying to imply that it was any worse, or indeed different, to the obsession with tanning in Western Europe, that's equally absurd and dangerous, but perhaps without the colonial and racial hierarchy undertones. So actually maybe it is worse.