The quest for a lighter shade of pale

Despite such health concerns, Karat and other women’s groups face an uphill battle. Skin lightening products are popular, and very much part of the cultural landscape. The Indian skin care market alone is worth an estimated $300 million, with companies such as Pond’s, Avon, Garnier, the Body Shop, Jolen, Olay, L’Oréal, Elizabeth Arden, Revlon and Estée Lauder all producing lightening creams. Seventy per cent of every dollar spent in a beauty salon in India goes toward skin lightening products. About two-thirds, or 60 per cent, of Indian women use these creams daily, according to research from L’Oréal India, as reported by the New York Times. And India is not alone: in an Internet survey, 30 per cent of the Chinese respondents use skin whiteners either daily or weekly, as do 18 per cent of Japanese, according to research published last year by ACNielsen.

This story plays out in Korea and the Philippines: the same survey revealed that 52 per cent of Koreans would prefer to have a fairer complexion, as would 28 per cent of Filipinos. There is an assumption that “fair is beautiful and dark-skinned women are usually provincial lasses from a lower income bracket,” explains Johanna Poblete, a reporter with Manila-based BusinessWorld, who has reported on the issue. Racial prejudices permeate such an environment: a number by the Filipino band Parokya ni Edgar voices the popular line, “we’re not turned on by your chocolate-coloured cheeks” (“Di kami natu-turn on sa kutis mong kulay champorado”). Another Filipino hit contained the boast, “mas maputi ang kutis ko,” or “my cheeks are paler than yours.”

Such biases are rooted in the age-old desire to please the opposite (or same) sex. In Malaysia, 74 per cent of men are attracted to women with fairer complexions, according to one survey; 68 per cent of Hong Kong men and 55 per cent of men in Taiwan said they preferred paler partners. In India, advertisements seeking brides or grooms for arranged marriages often request fair skin as a sought-after attribute, along with professional qualifications and a specific clan or social order.

There are deeper reasons too, says Nestor Castro, a cultural anthropologist at the Manila-based University of the Philippines. In southeast Asia, fair skin has been a symbol of wealth for centuries, he says, because only the rich could afford to stay inside rather than work in the fields. In the Philippines, certain women—the binukot—were kept out of the sun and were whiter than their brethren: the name literally means those who have been segregated, he says. They had wealth, prestige and power; they were the It girls of their villages. They were knowledgeable too: they were responsible for memorizing the folklore that preserved local history and the great Filipino epics. If you wanted to imitate their pale complexion, you could buy the appropriate cosmetics. Whitening powder was made from ground-up rice, and it was a valuable luxury and highly sought after. When the Europeans invaded, colonization didn’t introduce racial prejudices, but it exacerbated and codified them, Castro explains. In the Philippines, the Spanish ruled, and the mixed race Mestizos (half Spanish and half Filipino) were given positions of power and considered higher class than the pure Filipinos.

This story plays out in other Asian countries too: India has long had similar racial distinctions—the fairer Aryans are at the top of the social hierarchy, and the darker Dravidians dominate the lower classes, says Urvashi Butalia, the director and co-founder of Kali for Women, India’s first feminist publishing house. Religion reinforces these racial divisions, she says. In Hinduism, deities often divide according to skin colour: the positive gods, such as Sita Lakshmi or Saraswati, are fair, the negative ones dark, says Butalia. Indeed, the goddess of death and destruction’s name, Kali, actually means black in Sanskrit, although she is not viewed as evil in all of her manifestations. Once again, colonization didn’t introduce these divisions, but it also didn’t help. The pale-skinned English dominated the positions of power, and this hierarchy affected ideas about race long after the initial power structure collapsed, Butalia explains. “The desire to be white is present in the Hindu religion and pantheon,” she says.

In a written statement to Maclean’s, Unilever said that its creams catered to demand, and many companies manufacture similar lightening products. The desire to be fair among Asian consumers was no different from the Caucasian urge to be tanned. “In this context, there is nothing to suggest that the manufacture of such beauty products is exploitative or demeaning.” Previously, the company has said that its commercials are not “intended to suggest any correlation between skin colour and beauty.”

For Butalia and others, this link could not be more explicit; she believes it not only helps sales, but shapes people’s tastes and desires, entrenching the “fair skin is best” attitude. As proof, she points to the demand for whiteners among men. Practically non-existent 20 years ago, these creams are now promoted by leading politicians, such as Filipino senator Panfilo Lacson, and Bollywood actors such as Shahrukh Khan. A recent study by Ernst & Young shows sales among men have been growing at 150 per cent annually in Asia, compared to 20 per cent annually among women. Such figures suggest that Butalia and others who oppose the creams have their work cut out for them. “There is a latent desire to be fair,” Butalia says. “But the advertising campaigns also affect the popularity of these products. They suggest a dark woman is of no use, and we find that offensive.”