The Commodity of Beauty

During the Fall semester of 2023, I had the oppurtunity to conduct fieldwork and write an ethnography for my ANTH 428 course. Based on the previous coursework that we went through before we reached this assignment, I knew that I wanted to write about a community that I’m a part of and issues relating to the body that I’ve seen firsthand.

I decided to write about skin whitening in the Filipino community and how beauty is commodified. In addition to historic context being key, another big part of how beauty standards are sold to a group of people come from interactions with digital platforms, like social media, with people of power and money being easily seen in the current age rather than in the past. Famous people are able to share what they’re doing at any given time with the wider public. The superstructure that places people of lighter skin into positions of power and wealth influences creates class distinctions that promise social mobility and economic success to those who fit a certain look.

While this project didn’t include code or anything to be deployed, I think it greatly impacted my interest in tech and software engineering. I believe that an important part of software engineering is also understanding how people interact with your creations and how it affects an audience. In addition, I needed to use a lot of complex thinking to connect my research and interactions with subjects with theories that I studied in class from textbooks.

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