Saving face, from the sun: China's facekini boom isn't just about fair skin

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.

But it is in China where avoiding the sun has become a true art, and lately, a science. When I taught at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute in the early 2000s, my female students carried parasols in summer, snapping them open even inside buses to block the sun through the windows. Two decades later, parasols are passe, replaced by facekinis - sun-protection facewear now ubiquitous on the mainland.


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These come in gradations of coverage, some sheathing only the lower face, others clinging like plastic wrap over the entire visage. Covid made face masks unremarkable. But facekinis differ in material and intent: washable synthetic fabric, meant not to prevent disease but colour.

In 2024, sales of UV-protective wear in China reached roughly 80 bn renminbi ($11 bn), according to Daxue Consulting. The facekini is only the most macabre entrant in a market that also runs to hooded jackets with built-in face shields, hyaluronic acid-infused leggings, and ice-cooling gloves. Many carry certified UPF (ultraviolet protection factor) ratings, the clothing equivalent of SPF (sun protection factor). Staying 'fair and lovely' has spawned a small industry of textile engineering: full-body armour against a star nearly 150 mn km away.

What accounts for this desire for paleness? Colonialism and 19th-c. European racial hierarchies undoubtedly amplified the association between light skin and status across Asia. But the preference predates colonialism, in China's case, by roughly 2,500 yrs. Shijing (The Book of Songs), China's oldest surviving poetry anthology, compiled around the 6th c. BCE, likens a duke's bride's skin to congealed lard - a compliment, denoting smooth, unblemished whiteness.

The pursuit of fairness inspired an extraordinary catalogue of remedies. Traditional Chinese medicine offered numerous ways to lighten the complexion. The Ming dynasty 1596 medical compendium edited and compiled by Li Shizhen, Bencao Gangmu (Great Pharmacopoeia), recommended peas for a more luminous appearance. Another Ming reference, Li Chan's 1575 Yixue Rumen (Introduction to Medicine), prescribed a preparation called San Bai Tang, or Three Whites Soup: a combination of white peony root, white atractylodes (a herb) and white tuckahoe (a fungus).

More hazardously, women also ground pearls into powder and swallowed them, hoping the colour might transfer by osmosis. By the 20th c., the approach had moved from diet to disguise: Three Phoenix Begonia Powder, a compact of calcium carbonate and talc, enormously popular across Hong Kong in particular, was patted onto faces for an instant pallor. (It has since been repurposed by jewellers and watch restorers, who prize its abrasiveness for rubbing rust and tarnish off old metal, perhaps the least flattering afterlife any beauty product has ever had.)

The underlying logic survives in an idiom still current in the skin-whitening trade: Yibai zhe baichou (One whiteness covers a hundred uglinesses). Fair skin is promoted as a kind of ur-virtue, capable of compensating for every other imperfection.

The appeal was always about more than beauty. Pale skin marked those who could afford to stay indoors; a tan announced days spent bent over a field. Skin was a cipher of status, an instinct that survives today in the aspiration to be 'bai fu mei': fair, rich and beautiful.

In China, preference for fairness is rarely discussed as colourism. Sun protection is framed instead as health, skincare, anti-ageing. Colourism has no real foothold in Chinese public discourse. It's too combustible a label, one that risks opening the door to other kinds of discrimination-based grievance authorities would rather not entertain.

What is permissible is the neutral language of dermatology. A facekini wearer isn't practising a damaging social ideology. She is merely protecting her skin. Li Hua, a 23-yr-old graduate student who wears one even on cloudy days, says she dislikes the texture of sunscreen and worries about its chemicals. Covering her face simply feels like the healthier option.

Yet, beneath the skincare language lies a less-appetising reality. 'Frankly, I am considered too dark to be pretty by Chinese,' my friend Mei told me, adding that this partly explains why she has only ever dated foreigners. Even Mei finds the trend excessive, calling it 'creepy'.

There is real irony in millions pursuing beauty by concealing the very faces they're trying to perfect. Even the Communist Party has taken notice. There has reportedly been commentary in the People's Daily criticising 'sun-protection anxiety' (fangshai jiaolv), questioning whether the pursuit of total protection has gone too far.

But the facekini isn't really about the sun. What looks like a battle against UV rays is also a much older struggle over status and belonging. And the enduring belief that the body can reveal, even determine, one's place in the world.