It's not uncommon to see Taiwanese women open umbrellas before leaving a building or shield their faces as they run across the street on a sunny day.
As in many Asian countries, women go to great lengths to keep their skin pale.
Fair skin is so coveted that, as a traditional saying has it, it can compensate for three flaws in one's appearance.
Although toned and tanned celebrities such as singer Coco Lee present an alternative "healthy beauty" ideal, most Taiwanese women still strive for a porcelain rather than a copper look.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times' sister paper) reported in 2005 that whitening products accounted for up to 35 percent of Taiwan's NT$60 billion (US$1.8 billion) skincare and cosmetics market, grossing NT$21 billion in sales.
Although Japanese brands have traditionally held an advantage in this market, European and US brands that do not offer whitening products because of a lack of demand back home are scrambling to introduce whitening products into their lineup.
In addition to cosmetics and food products with purported whitening properties and skin resurfacing treatments such as facial peels and laser therapy, women now have another option in their quest to become as pale as possible.
A new book by singer and actress Barbie Hsu (
The Taiwanese bookseller Kingstone listed Beauty Queen 2: Female Celebrities Exposed as the number three non-fiction bestseller for last month.
The chapter in Hsu's book on whitening "needles," or intravenous drips, has become a hot discussion topic on internet forums for women fascinated by Hsu's claims about the treatment.
"Whitening needles are the female celebrity's most closely guarded secret," Hsu said in an extract of her book posted on the books.com.tw Web site.
"It's a complex mentality. People are more apt to accept those who improve their looks through lots of exercise or an exacting skin-care routine, but they may regard intravenous drips as a form of cheating," she writes.
"There is another reason that stars are unwilling to share the secret. As soon as everybody gets drips, the celebrity won't be considered particularly attractive anymore," she added.
"I don't administer them personally, but I have colleagues who do," Shu-tien Clinic dermatologist Cheng Hui-wen (
"As they are usually a cocktail of anti-oxidants such as vitamin C and tranexamic acid delivered intravenously, there's probably no harm associated with them anyway," she said.
Cheng said that whitening "needles" are usually sold in courses of 10 treatments at NT$1,000 per treatment.
However, another dermatologist interviewed by the Taipei Times, who declined to be named, questioned the safety of "whitening needles."
"There are no standards, everybody has their own proprietary formula," she said.
"They put whatever they think might work in there, all in extremely high doses. There could be anything in there from vitamin C to gingko extract," she said.
A small number of women, however, are going for the opposite of whitening.
Alex Chuang (
"Some of them need to be tan for professional reasons -- aerobics instructors and ballroom dancers need the color to show off their muscle definition. But others are just ordinary Taiwanese women," he said.
"I've asked some of them: `You're so pretty, why do you want to darken yourself?' They tell me they have wasted too much money trying to whiten themselves in vain," Chuang said. "They tell me that if they can't be really pale they want to go dark."
"What they don't want to be is the ordinary yellowish hue. They want to stand out from the crowd either way," he said. "We live in a competitive world; everybody strives to be noticed."
"In a way, the whitening and tanning businesses are the same," Chuang said. "We're both selling self-confidence."
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods