An ad for Chinese laundry detergent is being branded racist.
The brief commercial for local label Qiaobi, sees a Chinese woman draw in a black man with paint on his face, but instead of leaning in for a kiss, pops a soap capsule in his mouth and pushes him into a washing machine.
When she then opens it up, he emerges as an attractive, fair skinned Chinese man much to her thinly-veiled delight.
The ad has been showing on TV and ahead of movies in Chinese cinemas this month but it hasn’t taken long for it to leak online.
Understandably, it has since received plenty of backlash on Twitter.
There are some suggestions that the ad may be underpinned by one of China’s beauty ideals that favours lighter skin.
A 2004 survey by the World Health Organisation found 40 per cent of women in Hong Kong use skin bleaching products to appear fairer.
