For a China ingenue, a stroll along Beijing's streets can turn suddenly alarming, when she catches sight of ghoulish figures in full-face masks, only the whites of their eyes visible through slits. She needn't panic. These are neither bank robbers nor apparitions from a horror movie, but women - and some men - avoiding a tan.
A preference for light skin is endemic across much of Asia. In Japan, female joggers are hard to tell apart from beekeepers, given their elbow-length gloves, leggings and floppy hats. In Indonesia, it's difficult to find a shower gel that doesn't insist on whitening the user, results guaranteed in 4 weeks. In India, parsing skin colour into taxonomy - 'dusky', 'wheatish', 'creamy' - is a familiar family pastime.
