Fair Skin Advertising

The obsession with fair skin in India and how brands use it to advertise their products

We live amongst a stratum of men and women who are sure of the beauty that protrudes from the fairness of skin. Our voices are subjected to scrutiny based on how our color glows under the bright shine of the sun. When we look at the simple blocks of our daily lives we see a woman getting taunted by her own family for not making enough effort to lighten her skin so that her price which they have to pay in form of dowry could be lowered down. We see small kids running away from the sun and declining the offers for tea because their caretakers strongly advised them that sun and tea would make their skin dark. We see women on screen as submissive, heroic, maternal

One such campaign was ‘Dark is Beautiful’ by a NGO called ‘Women of Worth’ and actress and social activist Nandita Das in 2009. The campaign struggled to fight the bias in the country based on the skin tones. The main focus was highlighting the issue of fair skin in advertisements and showing the fair skinned men and women as attractive as and more acceptable than people with less color tones.

For any product to exist and be marketed there should be a customer to consume it and then buy it. ‘Supply increases as Demand increases’ is a very basic theory in Economics. Our outlook on the issue of skin color is to be blamed for complicating the fact that there is wide range of people out there with various skin colors. Framing one specific skin color as attractive or having one being employable or just putting out the idea that people with fair skins have better lives than the others is a form of s=discrimination that advertisements in India have been following. The creators of such advertisements, the actors and we the consumers of such discrimination are to be blamed. But there are humans who differ in their thoughts and don’t shy away from their acceptance of dusky skin color. Kangana Ranaut turned down an advertisement contract with a fairness cream company worth two crore and she stood by her ethics and denounced the bias that exists towards skin color. We need more celebrities like her who can entertain well as influence the people in the right