Are you beautiful, average or your armpits?

TWO things took over the discourse on beauty in the Philippines recently, one bound to the global enterprise of marketing a personal care brand like Dove, another the most petty and superficial of beauty demands on the morena Filipina: whiter armpits.

I’ve written in this space before about how painfully huge that gap is between what’s going on elsewhere in the world as far as the discourse on female images are concerned, compared to what’s going on in good ol’ Pinas, where women are bombarded with female celebrities who all have the same skin color, the same hair, who all sell whitening products and slimming pills, and make the EveryPinay feel like they need to change the way they look in order to achieve anything at all.