I'm Indian and especially with Indian women, lighter skin is generally considered to be more attractive, to the point where there's beauty products and techniques aimed at making women lighter skinned. I've heard that similar beauty ideals/standards exist in other Asian countries, like the Philippines and Korea, from my friends who are from those places.
Something that I hear a lot is that this is a direct result of European colonization. This is a pretty simple thought process as far as I can tell: white people were legally and socially superior for decades or centuries, so being lighter skinned became more attractive even after independence. This seems logical to me, but I don't think it's impossible that lighter skin was also historically considered more beautiful.
Is there any historical evidence to support this or is this just conjecture?
For one perspective on this question, you might want to see my earlier discussion of light skin in Japanese culture here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fc4cqt/comment/fj8l6ng
There is some good scholarship on this in the Lankan case. As well as the colonial context, throughout most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there's also a growing sense of connection among Sinhala nationalists with their Indo-European origins, in contrast to the Dravidian Tamils. In short: Sinhala people must be light-skinned, because they're northern/related to Indo-Aryans; the lighter-skinned you can appear then the more you "look Sinhala". It's cyclical.
What's really interesting is that this sort of colour distinction has a much deeper history in Lanka. The Sīgiri murals feature two distinct groups of women: one dark-skinned, the other golden-skinned. In the nationalist context I mentioned above they naturally got associated with Tamils and Sinhala respectively, but in the murals themselves there doesn't seem to be any particular hierarchy of beauty evident: if they are intended to represent different "ethnicities" then one isn't obviously portrayed as better or more beautiful than the other. We would need to re-check the (fifth-sixth century) poems composed about these murals to be sure, but I don't recall every coming across any comments therein which suggest the golden-skinned women were more beautiful than the others. RALH Gunavardhana has a great discussion of these murals in his paper "People of Lion," if you want something to follow up on!
Can mythological characters serve as examples? If you are an indian, draupadi in mahbharata is described as the most beautiful woman at the time on the planet, but several verses in mahbharata clearly point out she is dark skinned. Not the woman you would see in fair and lovely ads. So it likely is newer than atleast the time of writing the Mahbharata (latest being during the Gupta empire) . Indians seemed to value bone structure and facial structure much more highly than colour, if the description of ideal brides in some texts is taken, they generally talk about "neither too dark nor too light skinned", which many believe is a mean to rule out from marrying foreigners /mlechhas.