Why do Westerners risk skin disease for tans, while Chinese swim with balaclavas, trousers and long-sleeved shirts? It's because of different associations between tone and wealth, Tiffany Tan finds.

A light complexion is powerful enough to hide 100 faults.

This belief has long been chief among Chinese aesthetic values when it comes to judging appearances.

It's no wonder then that sunlight would become a glaring threat.

Twenty-four-year-old Li Biyu says she wears a whitening facial mask twice a week and smoothes on a whitening essence every other day to maintain her naturally light skin tone.

On summer days out, the Beijing graduate student from Hunan province applies sunscreen on her face and shields herself from the sun with an umbrella. Before cycling, she smears sunblock all over her body.

Some women on two wheels go as far as to wear long gloves despite the heat or don a small cape to cover their forearms. Others spend as much as 400 yuan ($65) on umbrellas that promise to block ultraviolet rays, while a growing number are shelling out thousands for laser-whitening medical procedures.

They're also getting some help from communications technology. Social media fans have developed a love for photo-enhancing phone applications, which enable them to lighten their skin tone in photos bound for the virtual world.

But there's probably nothing more jaw-dropping than the "facekini", a balaclava that covers a person's head and neck, with holes for the eyes, nostrils and mouth. This conspicuous type of headgear has become increasingly prevalent on Chinese beaches.

Richelle Gamlam, an American who studied in Beijing and Shaanxi's provincial capital Xi'an for a semester last year, was so intrigued by the Chinese obsession with white skin that she decided to make it the focus of a research project.

"As the weather in China began to get warmer and warmer, I noticed many unusual behaviors in Chinese women," begins her paper, An In-depth Look at the Chinese Quest for Lighter, Brighter and Whiter Skin.

"I saw women with sun umbrellas on the street and sweaters with long pants at the beach. Coming from America, a country with a tanning obsession, this focus on maintaining white skin, even at the cost of comfort and convenience, seemed alien to me."

The native of Seattle, Washington, wrote about her eye-opening first brush with whitening products, umbrellas to protect people from the sun - rather than the rain - as well as women swimming at the beach in jeans and long-sleeved shirts.

She also talked about meeting women who chose to do their street shopping in the evening or late afternoon, once the sun began to set.

Instead of hiding from the sun, most Caucasians bask under its brightness to get a darker skin color.

In Gamlam's country alone, this ideal of beauty has fueled the growth of a $5 billion indoor-tanning industry despite the associated risks of skin cancer, reports say. Gamlam likes to sunbathe by the beach or pool, though she says she's careful about overexposure that could lead to skin disease.

How did people develop such divergent ideas of beauty that lead some to endanger their lives in its pursuit?

Turns out, the answer is emulation of the lifestyles of their respective societies' rich and cultured.

In the West at the beginning of the 20th century, only the nobility and wealthy could afford to vacation at new resorts in places like southern France, Italy and Spain, says Bernd Schmitt, a professor of international business marketing at Columbia Business School.

They'd return from these beach trips with tans. So, darker skin became associated with the good life in the West, he explains.

In China, fair skin has been associated since ancient times with positive notions like "elegance, higher status and worldly city life rather than country life", Schmitt says in a phone interview from Singapore, where he serves as executive director of the Institute for Asian Consumer Insight and as a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University.

"When you work in the countryside, you get, of course, darker skin because you expose yourself to the sun and to the elements."

The common use of white-skinned models in the ads for Western fashion brands may add to the appeal of fairer skin in China, he says.

Gamlam has graduated from college and is back in Beijing, waiting to start a teaching job at a middle school in Ningbo, Zhejiang province.

Among the things the 22-year-old carried back from the US is a lacy white umbrella with a pattern of pink roses and golden swirls - a souvenir from her China trip last year.

"I thought I should bring it back with me because I would only ever use it here," she says.

Contact the writer at tiffany@chinadaily.com.cn.

Xu Junqian in Shanghai contributed to this report.

(China Daily USA 07/24/2013 page8)