NY Times: “It was enough to make a trio of heavily tattooed young men stop their playful splashing and to prompt a small boy to run to his mother in alarm: a woman rising out of the choppy waves of the sea, her head wrapped in a neon-orange ski mask.
The masks, made of stretchy fabric commonly used in bathing suits, are catching on as beachwear in Qingdao, a German colony before World War I and home to the Tsingtao Brewery.
“A woman should always have fair skin,” one mask-wearing bather explained. “Otherwise people will think you’re a peasant.”
As she made her way toward the shore, more people stared. A man floating in a yellow inner tube nudged his female companion, who muttered the question many others must have been asking themselves: “Why is she wearing that?”
“I’m afraid of getting dark,” said the mask-wearer, Yao Wenhua, 58, upon emerging from the seaweed-choked waters of this seaside city in China’s eastern Shandong Province. Eager to show why she sacrificed fashion for function, Ms. Yao, a retired bus driver, peeled the nylon over her forehead to reveal a pale, unwrinkled face.
“A woman should always have fair skin,” she said proudly. “Otherwise people will think you’re a peasant.””
via In China, Sun Protection Can Include a Mask – NYTimes.com.
Strange that Chinese have a colour prejudice based on ‘cultured’ urbanites not wanting to be mistaken for peasants. In India too there is colour prejudice, partly based on the same concern but also pre-historically Aryan invaders not wanting to be mistaken for native Indians who were driven into the deep south.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 
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