The quest for a lighter shade of pale

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.