With the success of Memoirs of a Geisha, the fairest-of-them-all geisha girls were inducted into the category of silver-screen babe a major advancement for Asian actresses and a lesser, but still significant, development for those among us for whom pearly white isn't just a preferred dental shade.

Ancient Asian history dictated that the whiter your skin was the higher your class, though nowadays the whitening market in Asia is booming for entirely different reasons. "While the first sign of ageing for Caucasian skin might be fine lines or wrinkles," says Beth Spruance, the vice-president of Global Treatment Marketing at Clinique, "for an Asian consumer their first sign of ageing really has to do with dark spots and discoloration, so whitening is big."

But "whitening" is a bit of a misnomer, because the objective of beauty products’ new ruling class is in fact brighter, not whiter, skin. "One of the major misconceptions is that it [Clinique’s new products] is a bleaching process," Spruance points out. "It's not. It's more about brightening and the evening of skin tones." Because there are no bleaching agents like hydroquinone in any of these products, women of a multitude of races can use them to enhance their skin's texture and help hyper-pigmentation.

So are we entering an era in which "blanc" is the new bronze? Not exactly. "It's not so much anti-tan, it's more anti-natural tan," claims Spruance. "Bronzing is definitely still a trend, but a bronzer over a brighter skin-tone looks better than one over a blotchy dull skin tone." So it seems that whether your skin-tone preference is pallid or golden, brighter is in fact always better. FV