This research analyses the discursive construction of beauty through skin care advertisements and its visual representations in Indonesian women’s magazines. Indonesia is an industrialising and increasingly global country with a sizable emerging middle class that is the largest in Southeast Asia. We explore themes of whiteness, naturalisation and scientification as socio-cultural constructions of beauty as the products not only promise youthful, smooth and fair skin to affluent middle-class consumers, but promote the constant ‘upscaling’ of lifestyle norms related to the pursuit of higher economic and social status. In this research, we draw on existing scholarship in gender, beauty, ‘whiteness’ (Ariss, Ӧzbilgin, Tatli & April, 2014) and ‘colourism’ (Glenn, 2009) that examines the growing phenomena of skin whitening in beauty products and their relationship to particular cultural contexts and locations. This body of theory and research has shown how ‘whiteness’ and ‘colour’ are constructs related to, but not the same as ‘race’, that carry complex meanings generated by the intersection of gender, colonial history, ethnicity, class and globalisation (Rondilla, 2009). While it has been long argued that beauty is culturally diverse in different markets and is multidimensional (Englis, Solomon & Ashmore 1994), it is also highly globalised (Jones, 2011). The globalisation also increasingly standardises communications campaigns run by creative advertising agencies who are predominantly Western or ‘Western trained’. This has contributed to a ‘transnational look’ (Frith, Shaw & Cheng, 2005), a ‘reduction in the range of global variation in beauty ideals’ (Jones, 2008, p.150), and a ‘narrow representation of beauty’ (Yan & Bissell, 2014). We question the extent of this resultant homogeneity in a non-Western context that is under-studied

• Jeaney Yip(University of Sydney, Australia)
• Susan Ainsworth(University of Melbourne, Australia)