'Being white makes you a winner': Thai beauty campaign 'showing dark skinned people as losers'

Thais tend to think Hitler was a pretty cool guy too.  They have different sensitivities to Westerners

A Thai company has pulled an advert for skin-lightening pills following an outcry on social media over a product sold with the tagline 'white makes you a winner'.

The advertisement for Seoul Secret's supplement called Snowz featured a veteran Thai actress Cris Horwang, 35, attributing her professional success to her pale complexion.

'It's not easy to stay at this point for a long time,' she says in the video. 'If I stopped taking care of my body and white complexion, all that I have invested will be gone.'

As she speaks, a smiling, younger woman enters the picture and Cris' own image darkens to charcoal black.

She's seen casting an envious look at the other woman who stands by her side.

'A newcomer will replace me and turn me into a dark star,' she says in the video, using a Thai idiom to refer to her fame fading.

Whitening creams and pills are wildly popular in Thailand, where pale skin is upheld as the standard of beauty in the media and among many Thais, and is associated with a higher social status.

Before its removal, the Seoul Secret video received more than 100,000 views on YouTube, and a flood of inquiries on the company's Facebook page about how to order the product.

But other social media sites drew posts railing against the advert for being racially offensive and reinforcing the country's narrow beauty ideals.

'It indicates that dark skin people are losers, and this is clearly racist,' a Thai commentator named Tammaijang wrote on the web forum Pantip.

SOURCE