For many of us, growing up in the Philippines meant growing up believing that white skin is better. If you have fair skin, you were considered maganda, artistahin, and kutis-mayaman. If you were darker-skinned though, what a shame! You would probably told that it’s a pity you were born kayumanggi, and given a number of suggestions on how to whiten skin.   

Go to the beauty section of any drug store or supermarket and you’ll find an iconic white box with a winking geisha. Kojie San has been a solid mainstay in the skin lightening sector, and it’s become so popular among international Asian Beauty fans that you can find listings for the brand’s famous soap on Amazon! While we at Project Vanity are not interested in skin lightening and whitening per se, we find that the Kojie San’s soap is one fo the most effective products to help even out darker areas.

If you’ve been a regular reader of Project Vanity, you’ve probably seen that we now have a podcast! I’ve been very excited since Liz and Den first announced it to the team as it’s something that I’ve long wanted for us to do. The topics have been very interesting but my favorite one so far is Episode 4, which discusses skin whitening. 

I grew up with dark brown skin. It was strange because both my mother and father have fair skin, and my brother - born two years after me - have had their creamy color since birth. I remember not caring when I was a child, but the older I got, the more I was compared to my brother. My parents’ friends would always comment that it’s a pity that I’m dark (“sayang maitim”) and that my brother was good-looking because he has such fair skin. This is the kind of crap that messes you up when you’re young, but when I entered college, my skin just lightened by itself. I didn’t use any product other than normal body lotions so I assume that this is my natural coloring.

At the start of every new year, we look forward to seeing what trends will become popular. Glossy lips? Baby bangs? More foodmetics? All sorts of makeup in Living Coral? Trends come and go and only time will tell which ones would come to define the year ahead. What we know for sure is that we’re saying goodbye to 2018 and its beauty hypes that were just not worth it.

For the skincare-obsessed there are, shall we say, rites of passage: first active, first “luxury” product, first “exotic” ingredient, and, perhaps as a result of all those other firsts, first time you over-exfoliate. Despite having been warned by several PV articles and every last K-beauty blog I could find, that “first” recently happened to me: my oily, naturally “chok-chok” skin became dry as a bone almost overnight, causing my cheeks to flake and my skin (which is naturally as white and pale as paper) to look dull and almost…is it possible for skin to look brittle?