White Beauty is a skin cream sold in India, made by Pond’s, that promises to lighten darker complexions. By using the product, brown-skinned persons can achieve “a pinkish white glow,” according to a series of recent television advertisements for the product. In one of these ads, a young woman is caught in a love triangle. She has been ditched for another lady, and longs to win back her man. For all the glossy production, there is nothing subtle about the story: the new girlfriend is pale and pinky, the jilted girlfriend has a dusky complexion. The ending is predictable: dusky uses White Beauty and wins back her sweetheart.
These ads were screened in India over the past few months, with an almost identical ad airing across Asia. (The Asian commercial was for Flawless White, a similar product made by the same company, Unilever.) Women’s groups in India decry such ads, deeming them offensive and racist, “denigrating to dark skin,” says Brinda Karat, the general secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association. The organization is campaigning to have advertisements for skin whiteners banned. They have met with the national Indian government to lobby lawmakers and voice their concerns. They have already achieved some success. Ads for the Fair and Lovely brand of lightening cream, also made by Unilever, were dropped in 2003 after Karat’s group lodged a complaint with the National Human Rights Commission in New Delhi. Ads for that cream depicted impoverished, darker-skinned women trapped by their circumstances and, implicitly, by the colour of their skin. In each, the dusky ladies were able to better themselves by slathering on Fair and Lovely. Once they were whiter, they were able to improve their circumstances, and land their dream jobs, as air stewards, actors and even cricket commentators.
Karat’s campaign is twofold. She wants to encourage Indians to see brown as beautiful, and to reject any idolization of paler complexions. She says the existing hierarchy is damaging and demeaning to a people (and also a continent) who, for the large part, have very different skin tones from the white ideal many espouse. To encourage people to rethink their attitudes toward race, she has launched an education campaign, distributing leaflets and holding meetings. These focus on raising awareness of the racism, subtle or overt, in the advertisements for these products, she says. They also look at the possible health concerns of skin whiteners.
Although not all of these creams use toxic chemicals, many of them use hydroquinone, a substance that is banned in concentrations of more than two per cent for over-the-counter beauty products in North America because of alleged links to skin cancer. (This whitener can be prescribed in higher concentrations by dermatologists to remove uneven pigmentation.) Other creams contain different compounds that inhibit production of melanin, which can be detrimental because it produces the dark pigmentation that protects the skin against the sun.
Pond’s says the active ingredients in White Beauty are lycopene and vitamin B3. Neither of these are bleaching agents; instead, explains John Goldhar, a prominent Toronto dermatologist, they are antioxidants that act as sunscreens. However, other unregulated creams contain mercury salts, or other bleaching agents such as hydrogen peroxide or magnesium peroxide. Mercury is more common than one might think: a study in 2000 by the Prince of Wales Hospital in Hong Kong tested 38 creams and found that eight of them contained excessive mercury. Although extreme reactions are rare, 19 Hong Kong women were hospitalized in 2002 with mercury poisoning linked to a skin whitening cream imported from mainland China.
The side effects of skin whiteners depend on the active ingredients, but a few weeks ago the British Skin Foundation issued a warning on the dangers of some of these creams, and Britain’s National Health Service has warned they can cause permanent skin bleaching, thinning of skin, blue-black discolouration or redness, or intense irritation.
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Seems like all the skin whiteners are not helping the Indian women in their quest to become fashion models. Indian fashion houses prefer the real white, as in European, not the pseudo white, ie., an artificially whitened Indian!
I currently live in Korea and this is all too apparent in Korean culture. It is not only the cream whiteners that women use, but myriad of methods to appear more ‘caucasian’. One of the most common in Korea, and maybe elsewhere in Asia, is eyelid surgery.
I believe this will become an ever more important socio-cultural issue as the East becomes more influential in this global age. I’m glad to see a dialogue is now being formed in India and in the West.
I don’t get it, there is a tanning salon on almost every corner of the Continental U.S./Canada. Our women are trying to look like the same women who are trying to get darker?
So we have discovered that Asians are susceptible to the same sort of Inadequacy Advertising as North Americans and Europeans?
It seems that advertisers have succeeded where Esperanto failed. We are finally all one people, all stupidly feeling bad about ourselves and trying to look and be something else.
Now me, I have a real problem, I’m too tall. Anyone know where I can buy leg shortening cream?
I’m by far from an expert on what Asian women want but my limited understanding is that dark skin is a sign of working outdoors (ie manual labour) and light skinned is a sign that you can hire someone to do your manual work. Nice to see the outrage industry is flourishing elsewhere in the world.
that notion was correct 100 years ago or more, and was a sign of wealth, not physical beautiy necessarily.
[...] Recently in the MacLeans magazine (yes the same one that ranked us so highly there was an article on skin whitening creams http://blog.macleans.ca/2008/11/14/the-quest-for-a-lighter-shade-of-pale/ [...]
“I’m by far from an expert on what Asian women want but my limited understanding is that dark skin is a sign of working outdoors (ie manual labour) and light skinned is a sign that you can hire someone to do your manual work.”
This was the same perception that operated in the West until the 20th century. Pale was the ideal. Once the industrial revolution was complete, the toiling masses went from working outdoors in the sun to indoors in factories and offices. Suddenly, having the leisure time to develop a tan was mark of wealth and the whole perception of beauty was turned on its head.
The whole point of this exercise is that beauty is a moving target. If ever a large number were to achieve some old standard, a new standard would arise that was more exclusive.
In other words, I’m not sure how racist it is. At least, I don’t think it’d be more racist and denigrating that those industries in the West.
Interesting. I’ve been watching ads for bronzing products and tanning salons for years and yet I had never heard them referred to as racist or offensive. We all know that ultimately advertising is only concerned with the bottom line….dollars. If you find the commercial or product offensive, don’t buy it. I would like to give more credit to the ladies in Asia. I just can’t believe that the advertisements for these products are responsible for low self esteem. I do believe that some savvy advertising firms and companies noticed the issue and decided to exploit it. Why is this a surprise? The pharmaceutical companies do it all the time. What we should be investigating is why this product is popular. Maybe it’s as simple as we all want what we don’t have and we have a problem just accepting and being happy with who we are. We need to stand back, take a look, and decide which came first…the chicken or the egg?
[...] Re: Do Indian Women Want Lighter Skin? Quote: Originally Posted by tottycat So, it’s not just pale redheads that have tons of freckles! I have just as many, but they are not as noticeable because I am not extremely pale Me too!!! I’ve got Asian skin with slight yellow undertones but around my cheekbones, I have some spotty freckles and they really annoy me. I admit to buying some of these whitening creams/masks before but it’s because I use them to try to even out my skin tone and imo, I feel that a slightly fairer complexion works better with the makeup I put on. And as a side note, I flipped through my Maclean’s from last week (I think it was last week) and came upon this article, which is imo, similar to the first article and it scares me that it’s so common for advertisers to demean other people based on the colour of their skin to promote their product. I’m all for capitalism in some respects, but when this happens it just makes me sad. Here’s the online link to the article I was talking about if anybody’s interested!!! Macleans.ca Blog Archive The quest for a lighter shade of pale [...]
[...] Comment! The following is an article that I recently came across in MacLeans: The quest for a lighter shade of pale. [...]