Peddling transformation is lucrative.

It is especially lucrative when a company peddles the transformation of one’s skin color, and a consistent theme unites all of the products under this cosmetic category: skin whitening, skin brightening and skin lightening.

According to a report by Global Industry Analysts, the skin whitening and lightening market will be worth approximately $20 billion by 2018. The primary “target” regions for these products, as well as the regions where these products are highest in demand, are in Asia and the Middle East.

Of course, I am not trying to criticize the people who use these products, regardless of whether they use them for cosmetic or medical reasons. I do, however, want to scrutinize why people feel compelled to spend money in an attempt to change their otherwise healthy skin.

I do not have to look very far to find one answer. Last quarter, I wrote about my last name and how it obscured, for many people, the fact that I am ethnically 100 percent Korean. But what I didn’t include in that narrative was the extent to which my non-pale skin tone contributed to people’s confusion when I told them I was Korean-American. I remember having to tell someone at Northwestern that not all Koreans were pale, and I received silence in return.

I was aware of my skin tone and that it was not similar to the stereotype of the “pale Korean.” In fact, after a seven-year-old girl in my Sabbath School class demanded to know why I was using a peach crayon to color a drawing of myself, my four-year-old brain could not muster a response because I knew she was right, at least superficially.

Sixteen years and many reflections later, I finally have an answer. Even by the age of four, I learned through picture books — both Korean and American — that pale skin was the “normal” color. It was the color that was most represented in my picture books, my television shows and my own Korean church. Hence my automatic preference for a peach crayon to represent myself, even though the color did not represent me.

It frustrates me that at one point in time in high school, I almost believed that my skin color and perceptions of “Koreanness” were mutually exclusive. But now I have stopped to take the time to ask whose perceptions were making me feel this way, I see that the obsession with white skin is in part a byproduct of history and a longstanding colonial legacy. I see now that our current beauty standards bear the history of colonialism such that too many people worldwide strive to achieve “whiteness” and spend too much money to that end.

Perhaps these cosmetic companies — already too numerous to list — are simply catering to the demands of the cosmetic market. The numbers show the demand for whitening products has and will continue to persist. But what I want to point out is that there is a profound difference between buying skin whitening products because you wanted to try out a new complexion and buying these products because you believe your current skin tone signifies inferior socioeconomic class or a failure to achieve a standard of beauty that is a legacy of colonialism.

It disturbs me that somehow the perceptions surrounding the largest organ of the human body — our skin — can make so many people feel small and without confidence. And it makes perfect sense that the companies peddling skin whitening products also peddle promises of transformation that cater to a rather exclusive standard of beauty.

It all makes perfect, sickening sense.

Naomi Johnson is a Weinberg sophomore. She can be reached at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this column, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected].