There’s much ado about fairness creams all of a sudden. As of the writing of this post, consumer goods behemoth Unilever is rebranding its well-known fairness cream brand, Fair & Lovely{:target=’_blank’}.
The Oxford dictionary defines ‘virtue signaling’ as “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue.” The #BlackLivesMatter movement has truly unleashed virtue signaling left, right and centre, across social media and op-eds, in people’s personal and work email inboxes, podcasts and talk shows. Unilever simply rebranding their decades-old racist fairness cream as a response to criticism of late is a solid example of this phenomenon.
I tweeted the following{:target=’_blank’} around one year ago in June 2019:
It was in response to 30 Miss India finalists in the same year having the exact same “fair” skin tone. One news outlet reported that other photos of the same contestants showed them in their true skin colour which was much darker, but Femina and the pageant’s sponsors always chose the “fairer”-looking photos in their campaigns. In fact, all finalists had the exact same long & dark straight hair too.
Asia and India’s obsession with fairness is an issue engrained in the culture. Products like Fair & Lovely and the countless other fairness creams marketed in India capitalize unsympathetically on this inherent weakness in modern Indian culture and make the problem infinitely worse. They sell dark-skinned people a potentially fairer version of themselves and promise significantly more success in life. With A-list celebrities in Hindi cinema endorsing fairness creams throughout the last few decades, the cultural conditioning has never faltered. And the storylines are not subtle. A several-episode long ad series featuring Priyanka Chopra, Saif Ali Khan and Neha Dhupia{:target=’_blank’} shows Saif Ali Khan going out with a fair-skinned Neha Dhupia until a dusky Priyanka Chopra starts using a product called “Pond’s White Beauty”, at which point he finally notices the suddenly fairer-looking Chopra. Here’s an ad for Fair & Lovely{:target=’_blank’} depicting a dark-skinned woman and a fair-skinned woman auditioning for a dance role. Fast-forward a decade and Pond’s runs a similar campaign featuring an A-list actress of today’s era Kiara Advani{:target=’_blank’} for the same Pond’s White Beauty product — only this time, an updated tagline appears printed right on the sachet: Spot-less Fairness. These ads continue to run despite strong guidelines from the Advertising Standards Council of India, as per this article in The Wall Street Journal{:target=’_blank’} from 2014.
As an Indian of significantly dark skin, I was viciously discriminated against throughout my childhood by people at my elementary school in Delhi, India — kids would often refer to me and several other dark-skinned classmates as “darkie”. To some extent, even teachers seemed to be more lenient towards fair-skinned students. This discrimination was not confined to school either. Family members would often make remarks on my skin colour in the form of casual, passive comments. This is what living North India felt like in the 90s and 2000s. And it hasn’t changed much.
The obsession with fair skin is prevalent in the Indian diaspora as well. At college in Canada, North Indian girlfriends of a couple of friends casually mocked their darker-skinned boyfriends as being somehow inferior than their fair-skinned selves. I was surprised to find that people who’ve grown up in countries like Canada and US projected this colourism so openly. One can attribute it to their North Indian upbringing and the decades-long conditioning that the degree of their beauty is heavily dependent on the fairness of their skin. Essentially a subset of white privilege, in the Indian community, the fair-skin privilege has been a taboo topic to talk about until recent years. I was moved by one very fair-skinned North Indian friend who over dinner a few years ago narrated to me the special treatment her fair skin gets her when she visits Delhi. That was a rare instance — you’ll be hard pressed to find fair-skinned Indians acknowledge this privilege. It’s something that simply exists in the fabric of everyday life and everyone knows and feels it, but no one admits it.
And Indian women experience it the most. In most North Indian families, the misogynistic bride-searching process of arranged marriages often puts the “fair-skinned” requirement near the top of the list. A potential dark-skinned bride is expected to have other redeeming qualities such as a top-quality education or numerous talents. A potential fair-skinned bride doesn’t need anything else to “market” herself other than her fair skin. In the jarring world of Indian arranged marriages, a fair-skinned groom with strong education credentials and a good career ahead always has a leg up on a darker-skinned groom with similar credentials. In newspaper ads or on websites like Shaadi.com, you won’t have to search far to find ads that mention “wheatish complexion” or “very fair complexion” either as an attribute or preference of the advertising bride or groom, or in lots of cases, a hard requirement.
If you think this sounds ridiculous, the Hindi film industry will clear your doubts. The majority of actresses in lead roles are fair-skinned, or at least are made to look fair-skinned through a combination of makeup, lighting and digital effects. It is widely accepted that to break into Hindi cinema as a lead actor or actress, being dark-skinned works against you. Well-known songs{:target=’_blank’} with almost a billion views on YouTube openly tout lyrics like “Tenu kala chashma jachda ae jachda ae gore mukhde te” which essentially means “your black sunglasses suit your fair-skinned face”. Or the much less subtle, Chittiyian Kalaiyan song{:target=’_blank’} with almost half a billion views on YouTube whose chorus, “Chittiyaan kalaiyaan ve, Oh baby meri white kalaiyaan ve”, literally means “white wrists, oh baby, my fair-complexioned wrists” — a quality the character of Sri Lankan actress Jacqueline Fernandez uses to entice her lover in the disastrously bad Hindi film Roy. Cinema is so tightly integrated with Indian culture itself that these highly discriminatory songs are top choices for dance performances at South Asian weddings. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone at the wedding who thinks there is anything wrong with that.
While A-list celebrities in India endorse fairness creams with one hand, they simultaneously post pleas on social media with the other hand to support the #BLM movement by posting messages like “all colours are beautiful” or quotes about racial injustice from Desmond Tutu or MLK. A Twitter thread highlights this hypocrisy{:target=’_blank’} very clearly. It’s not just people who are now finally starting to speak out, but celebrities as well. Actor Abhay Deol took to social media{:target=’_blank’} to call out ‘woke Indian celebrities’ for this duplicitous behaviour. Celebrity Chef Padma Lakshmi took to Instagram{:target=’_blank’} to lobby for an end to Fair & Lovely. “Anyone else out there sick and tired of being told that fair=lovely?”, she wrote, adding that it “did a number on [her] self-esteem” growing up.
Like Padma Lakshmi, I can vouch, from first-hand experience, the feeling of shame internally that colourism causes growing up. And it stays with you for a long time. I’ve spent years unconditioning myself from this insecurity through introspection. Sadly, for many others, the process hasn’t even started. To this day, Gen-Z is growing up in households which condition them to think that fair skin is more beautiful than dark skin.
Nonetheless, due to all this backlash getting media coverage, perhaps the revolution has finally begun. However, a simple rebranding of products, like Unilever did this week, is nowhere near what needs to be done. According to The Wall Street Journal{:target=’_blank’}, Fair & Lovely brings in $560 million in annual revenue for Unilever. In a capitalistic world, to expect an NYSE-listed company with $145 billion in market cap to stop selling one of their most successful products is naivety.
But the truth is that so much can be done by policy makers and influencers. Regulation is one way — a tobacco-like high tax on fairness products could make it unaffordable for people to buy fairness creams and expensive to sell for consumer goods companies. But this can only happen with massive public support and influencers lobbying for such regulation. Also, if more celebrities speak out and bluntly refuse to endorse fairness creams, consumer behaviour may change altogether. If ‘woke’ people bring these issues up at the dinner table discussions with their families, perhaps a cultural change could occur. Beauty companies, the ad industry, policy makers, celebrities, journalists, song writers, movie makers, and the public — the onus is on everyone to root out this harmful bias from our culture.