The idea of beauty is often associated with fairness. Both men and women in the country yearn for a fairer skin. Hundreds of millions of rupees worth of skin whiteners are sold in the country every year. Looking at the fairness product ads, these creams allegedly provide the complete solution to the problems of marriage, success, empowerment, job opportunities and confidence!

The earliest Fair & Lovely (FAL) advertising simply explained how it worked without harming the skin. Once that was established, FAL went on to the romance angle, which it dropped only about a decade ago. This showed someone rejecting and then accepting the girl: after she had attained a level of fairness, of course! Finally romance gave way to finding a career or shaping one’s destiny (the cricket commentator ad).
Most of us may still remember an FAL TV commercial that showed a depressed looking father who wished that he had a son instead of a dark-complexioned daughter. Beca-use the daughter was dark, her job prospects were limited and she was working in a low-paying job. Even her marriage prospects seemed bleak. Then the daughter decided to do the smart thing. She began using FAL to transform herself into a beautiful and confident girl. In no time, she became fair and beautiful and found it easy to bag a productive job as an airhostess. And gain in confidence: cut to a coffee shop located in a five-star hotel where she takes her wide-eyed parents.
Indians are so obsessed with skin colour that advertisers have made it a big issue amongst women. Matrimonial ads, week after week, hammer home this message: dark is ugly, fair is lovely. The dark can sit on the marriage shelf, there is demand only for the fair or very fair. And it is not uncommon to find dark men marrying into poor families just because they want a fair bride.
It isn’t as if only women have been bitten by the fairness bug; if anything, the yearning for fairness is not gender specific. It seems to affect both sexes equally. A case in point is the famous advertisement in which the Bollywood actor, Shah Rukh Khan is seen playing the leading role of a “male beauty advisor”. The advertisement for Emami’s Fair and Handsome cream had the actor advising a rather depressed looking young man to start using fairness cream in order to boost his sex appeal. That is what the young man does, and in a matter of days, he is noticeably fairer and Voila, he gets the girl!
The message in these all too popular commercials is that one must get whiter skin in order to get that “Dream Girl” or “Dream Job”. Similarly, look at Vaseline brand’s campaign where a Facebook application invites users to lighten their skin. The ‘Vaseline Men be prepared’ campaign, with the tagline ‘People see your face first’, offers to create a fair and spotless picture. Thus the marketing at work behind the beauty industry is fierce and intensely well thought out.
Among the first companies to take fairness beyo-nd creams was Godrej, with FairGlow being launched as a fairness soap first and a cream later. Other players quickly followed with fairness soap launches, and this snowballed into fairness face-washes, no marks creams, fairness winter creams and so on. Fair-ness slowly started seeping into the skincare kit in more ways than one.
International brands like Ponds, L’Oreal Paris, Gar-nier, Olay and Johnson & Johnson (Neutrogena) flo-cked to India with global expertise in skincare problems, ranging from ageing to drying and acne. It took these companies a while to realise that if they were to truly capture the Indian market — nothing succeeded as well as fairness products.
Today, however, with the changing trends in the industry, a woman isn’t looking for plain gorapan; she wants something more. Something that tackles dark spots, the dullness of her skin or her uneven skin texture. With ‘fair skin’ being the most fantasised about asset. Most international brands are making use of words like skin-lightening, brig-htening, whitening or giving the skin a pink glow, or gold radiance, instead of the old-fashioned ‘fairness’. Today it’s all about differentiation. Global brands have realised that plain fairness won’t work anymore, and that is why such terms are emerging.
However, with different shades of whitish-brown skin, we need to understand that one’s colour is based on one’s genes and the pigmentation of one’s skin. Also, that with the steadily growing liberal economy the market is rampant with various national and international fairness brands all offering high claims for fairness solutions. With such discrimination are we not reflecting shades of unfairness and a degraded image of the Indian beauty? Think about it.

The writer is associate professor (marketing), MDI, Gurgaon