Interesting idea I read recently. It said whiter skin isn't the simple cultural phenomenon it used to be anymore because nowadays individuals can purchase whiteness for themselves. Bleaching creams, face masks, makeup of all sorts, are available at the level of the consumer, meaning we have to ask what we're seeing when we see whitened skin: is it a beauty ideal or an instance of someone construing consumption as social agency (they buy whitening cremes and thereby make themselves better). I suppose this idea applies to all beauty products and probably men's fashion too and not just skin bleachers. But in the case of skin whitening, it's interesting, the thought that people aren't (wholly) expressing a beauty ideal but instead harping on the existence of their own agency. Maybe people's jimmies rustled most of all because showing a fashion model who was neither white nor even uniformly pink suggests, paradoxically, that celebrating normal looking people *removes* those normal looking people's ability to better themselves.
Plus, she has freckles anyway. No smiles in that life.