‘INSULT TO CHINA’: FRECKLES SPARK STORM
Jing Wen, 25, has modelled for Chanel and Prada and appeared on the cover of Vogue in China and Italy. But on Chinese social media, images of her freckled face have provoked a storm of outrage and abuse, spreading under the hashtag “Insult to China”.
The model, known in China as Li Jingwen, appears in a campaign for the Spanish fashion brand Zara with her lips a striking crimson and the rest of her face bare — leaving her freckles on full display.
The online response in China, where freckles are relatively uncommon and fashion images favour smoothly pale skin, has been fierce. Some users have accused Zara of imposing white beauty standards on Chinese women; others have come to Li’s defence and questioned the ideals driving the backlash.
One commenter objecting to the image wrote, “Why are freckled faces misconstrued as high fashion?” Another chimed in: “So that’s how you see Asian women? I’ve lost all desire to buy things.”
A third said the image was “just the West’s beauty standards for Asians, very different from ours”, adding, “For those women to be called the most beautiful in Asia feels like discrimination to the rest of us.”
Another commenter wrote, “I feel it’s not the brand discriminating against Asian women, but people discriminating against people with freckles.”
“Chinese people sometimes forget how diverse we actually are,” said Maya Yu Zhang, a 27-year-old Chinese filmmaker based in New York. She also expressed hope that the tone of the debate would become more open-minded.
Ma Heqi, a 24-year-old from Dalian in northeastern China, said she had tried to remove her freckles — known as “sparrow marks” in China — with laser therapy. “Even though I went overseas to study, I still find the existence of freckles on my face quite unpleasant,” she said, adding that some had called them “pockmarks”.
Jia Tan, a professor of cultural studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, noted that there was a long tradition that “measures nonwhite women’s beauty according to its approximation to white beauty”, with depictions sometimes veering into the territory of racist tropes. However, she said, the online backlash in this case “fell right into the rhetoric of nationalism and patriotism”.
Chinese state-run news media covered the controversy but seemed disinclined to whip up further outrage.
Li, a photographer herself, has not publicly commented on the response to the Zara images, but she did speak about her freckles in a 2016 interview with Vogue.
“When I was little, I really hated them because normally Asians don’t have them,” she said. “In high school, I always tried to cover them, but now it’s okay. I like them, and that’s enough.”