That's why Asian women are shelling out lots of money these days to lightentheir skin, a market the world's cosmetics makers expect to be huge. Whilenobody tallies sales of cosmetics across Asia, they totalled $3.5 billion atwholesale last year in Japan alone, the world's second-largest cosmeticsmarket. And the cosmetics companies say women are once again buying fasteras Asia recovers from a crash in 1997. Whiteners, the cosmetics companiessay, are one of the quickest-growing types of cosmetics. In China, forinstance, sales of whiteners rose by a quarter to $12 million last year,according to ACNielsen Asia Pacific. In more prosperous Hong Kong, salesmore than doubled at $9.5 million, the market research firm says.

From poverty-stricken India to modern, prosperous Japan, these cosmetics areabout class more than race. It's not that Asian women want to look likewhite women. Instead, they dislike dark skin because it implies an inferiorsocial class that must labour in the fields under the hot sun.

The whitener business also illustrates Asia's increasing importance tomultinational makers of everything from cars to corn flakes, especially nowthat the world's most populous market is recovering from the 1997 meltdown.One example of that importance: While a tiny minority of the world'spopulation is white, until recently most cosmetics were made for whitewomen. Nowadays multinational cosmetics companies make lotions and creamsand lipstick just for Asian women.

Consider New York-based Estee Lauder Cos., one of the world's largestcosmetics concerns, with $4.2 billion in sales. Asian sales fell right after1997 to a little more than a tenth of the world-wide total. One way thecompany is trying to increase them is by introducing a new whitener,WhiteLight Brightening System, developed exclusively for Asia.

WhiteLight includes licorice to prevent skin inflammation from strongsunlight or pollution; green tea, an anti-oxidant, to prevent damage fromair; and vitamin C, which is supposed to inhibit production of melanin,which colors the skin. A 30-milliliter bottle of lotion costs almost US$62in Hong Kong.

Lauder says it was the first Western maker of expensive cosmetics to sellwhiteners in Asia, in 1986, when an economic boom around the region ignitedsales of luxury goods such as expensive cosmetics. The company won't say howimportant whiteners are to its Asian operation, but the skin-care part ofits business, which includes whiteners, is almost two-thirds of Asiansales.

To push the new product, Lauder hired Japanese ad agency Dentsu Young &Rubicam. It soon learned by interviewing Asian women in focus groups thatthey aspire to skin untouched by pollution or the sun, like a baby's skin orthe skin on the inside of their arms. So the television commercials featurea small child and a young woman. There's a lot of competition in thismarket, though, and the ads, says Shinichiro Shimizu, an Estee Lauder seniormarketing manager, were designed to break through the "competitiveadvertising clutter."

The competition isn't just at the expensive end of the market, either.Dallas's Mary Kay Corp., known for giving pink Cadillacs to its best salespeople, sells inexpensive cosmetics to women in their homes. The vitamin Ccream that Mary Kay is marketing, Replenish C, is one of its fastest sellersin Asia, says Jeremy Lu, managing director of the decade-old Mary Kay HongKong operation. "Asian women," he says, "like to be white."

That's the opposite of American women, who prefer to be tanned. The big UScosmetics companies have also discovered large markets at home in makinglipstick and lotions for African-American and Latino women, but these womendon't generally want whiteners, either.

Nor is everyone thrilled with whiteners in Asia. As one angry Malaysian manwrote to The New Straits Times newspaper last year about a televisioncommercial for a whitener: "Is this the way to treat our women who have tolive with their God-given looks?"

In the commercial, a man catching a train ignores a darker-skinned woman,who then rubs the product on herself and soon catches the gentleman'sattention. "It is amazing how tasteless advertisers are when dreaming upsuch nonsense," the writer fumed, "and it is a disgrace that the relevantauthorities endorse it."

Mostly, though, skin whiteners are no big deal in Asia, just another part ofthe beauty regimen for women like Kam, 31, the MTV spokeswoman.

-- The Wall Street Journal