Case study one - Whitening Creams for White Women? Contradictory Cosmetics in Early Twentieth-Century Spain

The market for skin-whitening creams in Spain exploded in the 1930s. Pharmacies were flooded with products such as Cera Aseptina, Crema Tokalon, Esmalte Millat, Crema de la Meca, Crema Duqesa, and more. Their sales slogans and marketing strategies varied considerably, but they were all united in one aspect: their adverts centred around a white female protagonist depicted at various stages of her skin whitening journey. The sales slogan for Cera Aseptina cream was “Three Shades Lighter”. It boasted “Skin as White as Marble”, and promised that “Your Skin Will Whiten While You Sleep”. In one advert from 1930, the same woman’s face was printed three times, only that she became whiter with each reproduction, changing from dark grey to bright white as she inched closer to the viewer. Yet, in just a few years, the darker shaded women disappeared, leaving only images of bright white women seeking to become whiter. In one example from 1932, a white woman was depicted cradling her child under the title, “Soft and White Skin, Like a Baby’s”; and in 1933, a white woman was shown surrounded by three admiring white men. Spanish skin-whitening creams moved from a visual narrative of “lightening” towards one of “whitening” that better matched the European market. 

Many of the skin-whitening creams sold in Spain, such as Cera Aseptina and Crema Tokalon, were fabricated by Cooper Cosmetics, a Swiss cosmetics company founded in the early twentieth century. Cooper Cosmetics sold its products across Europe and as far as Australia and Latin America. Their global reach makes them likeable to Pilules Orientales. Yet, they differ in one important aspect: while Pilules Orientales maintained a relatively consistent image across their different sales points, Cooper Cosmetics allowed greater flexibility, outsourcing illustration decisions to the country in question. The adverts thus reveal the thought processes of advertising executives as they tried to tap into the specific needs and desires of their national consumers. 

Marketing whiteness to a supposedly white audience presented a particular challenge in Spain, a country so sensitive about the question of race. After the reconquest of Granada in 1492 — a date that Baltasar Fra-Molinero labels “the starting date of the whitening of Spain” — the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand began passing increasingly exclusionary decrees, eventually expelling all Muslims and Jews who would not convert to Christianity by 1502, and enforcing “limpieza de sangre” (purity of blood) checks upon those who stayed. But Spain’s mixed ethnic and cultural heritage haunted the nation, as other European powers looked upon the country as having a “morally blackened alien whiteness or off-whiteness and doomed hybridity”. In his book Impurity of Blood, Joshua Goode shows how Spain abandoned its obsession with “purity of blood” in favour of the exaltation of the “strength of Hispanic mixed-racedness” in order to keep up with broad European developments in racial science. Spaniards developed complex rhetorical devices that allowed for discussions about mixed-racedness that never challenged whiteness. 

Given this fraught history, the reader might expect Spanish skin-whitening creams to promise something different to their European counterparts. But the reality is that Spanish skin-whitening creams followed the trends of their French and American counterparts. Early Cera Aseptina and Crema Tokalon creams focused intensely on the question of whiteness, publishing extremely racially charged images. Yet, as the decade wore on, both of these Cooper Cosmetics products abandoned this approach. They shifted from showing darker-skinned women becoming lighter, to showing bright white women entrancing admiring men. It is as if they were following the style of their French Cooper Cosmetics counterparts: in France, Cire Aseptine and Créme Tokalon adverts focused primarily on youth and marriage. 

Despite the dramatic shift in Spanish skin-whitening marketing, this chapter will show that whiteness remained central to the appeal of Cera Aseptina and Crema Tokalon adverts in Spain. Whiteness had not become unsellable; rather, it had become invisible. Cera Aseptina and Crema Tokalon thus began to promise other desirable traits, such as youth, maternity, innocence, and desirability. Whiteness was encoded into the background, rather than the foreground, of their marketing. 

Case Study Two - White Orientalism: The Strange Case of Oriental Pills in Early Twentieth-Century Spain 

Case Study Three - The Resonances of Historical Representations of Whiteness in Contemporary Spain

Bibliography: