Skin bias sets tone for sales blitz
Bleaching creams and skin-sloughing treatment are big business in India.
By Mike McPhate
For The Inquirer

July 11 2005

NEW DELHI, India - The young woman, with pretty eyes and flawless diction, aspires to celebrity. But her skin is too brown. One day her sister hands her a tube of Fair and Lovely skin cream.

Flash forward.

PHOTO: MIKE MCPHATE

An advertisement for Bi-White in central New Delhi. The poster promotes the skin cream's "Intensive Whitening Corrective Care."

She's decked out in heels and a pink sari, her hair is styled in willowy curls, and her complexion is pale, nearly as white as her smile. She lands her dream job as a cricket commentator. Mom wipes a joyful tear.

The storylines of television ads like this one, packaged by turn in themes of love and career, have helped propel a blossoming market for skin whiteners in southern Asia. It exploits a deeply rooted bias here: to the Indian gaze, dark skin is ugly.

"Racism has become a part of the Indian psyche," Pavan Varma, author of Being Indian: The Truth About Why the Twenty-First Century Will Be India's, said via e-mail. "The real irony is that a brown nation looks down on the dark."

India, home to one-sixth of humanity and the birthplace of four major religions, is a country bursting with variety. Inhabitants speak more than 1,500 languages and dialects and align with as many as 772 registered political parties. The nation is made up largely of sunny tropics and deserts. Most of its people range in skin tone from tan to dark brown.

The sirens of Indian cinema and fashion, though, as across much of Asia, are with few exceptions tall, slender and honey-hued. It's the skin color of Aishwarya Rai, the green-eyed former Miss World and paragon of Indian beauty, but it's possessed by a small fraction of the general population.

Each Sunday, the fair ideal is put on display in un-romantic marriage ads that fill a large part of many Indian newspapers. Alongside requirements for slim bodies and expertise in household work, suitors request skin tones within the narrow range of "fair" to "extremely fair."

The fetish for light skin persists even among Indian immigrants to North America. A study in the Journal of Social Psychology found that among South Asian-Canadian women, those with the lightest skin felt the prettiest.

"They believe they are like an onion - that the inner part is much more shiny bright," says New Delhi dermatologist Rishi Parashar, who often sees patients arrive with rashes after applying bleach to their skin. "These people will never be happy."

Indian anthropologists say the preference is ancient, carved into the culture by waves of light-skinned invaders, most recently the British, that left natives with the stubborn notion that they were inferior. The complex spans both city and village, and afflicts both sexes. One study found men make up a quarter of fairness-cream users.

"The term for English was gora," says R.P. Mitra, an anthropology lecturer at Delhi University, referring to the Hindi-language word for white. "Gora was seen as someone who is superior, more knowledgeable, with strength, power, cunning."

Women have invented a variety of tone-battling techniques. In the summer, they shield themselves with scarves, gloves and big-brimmed hats. They soak their bodies in combinations of milk, honey, lemon, cucumber and almond juice, eating the same during pregnancy with the hope of producing pearly-complexioned children.

In the last 14 years, though, with the rise of India's economy and birth of a 300 million-strong middle class, an appetite has risen for more modern strategies. Young, urban women, whether poring over the top-selling fashion magazine Elle or tuning in to Friends and Ally McBeal, have become intoxicated with Western glamour.

Companies, including Avon, Estée Lauder, and Revlon, have responded with an armory of skin-lightening products, commonly containing bleaching agents such as hydroquinone and Kojic acid. In just the last five years, the market for such creams grew by about two-thirds, to more than $230 million.

Ashok Venkatramani, spokesman for the leading brand, Fair and Lovely, which is made by Hindustan Lever Ltd., said in a statement that the company does not promote fair skin. Women's desire for lighter skin is equivalent to a desire for different hair color, he said. "This we feel is completely a matter of personal choice," he said.

The cricket-commentator ad, Venkatramani said, "does not condemn a woman who is not fair. It simply delivers the message that it is possible to change one's outlook towards life."

Business at more than 60,000 beauty salons across India, where cosmetologists wield acids and tiny sandblasters to sear away the color-rich outer layer of skin, is roaring, proprietors say. A study last year found the $400 million industry clocking as much as 25 percent growth in the number of salons.

"There's always a need to make people beautiful," says Amarjit Guliar, proprietor of the White Orchid Beauty Parlor, tucked along a clamoring commercial strip in southern New Delhi.

"It's not that she should be very fair - like British color," she says. "It's the whole personality that matters."

Geetanjali Kumar, a regular customer at another salon, where a cool, peach-walled lobby displays four posters of Nordic-looking models, praised her dermatologist for giving her skin that "glows."

"Dr. Azad is a person who I'll consider next to God," she said in a feedback form.

The fair-skin juggernaut has inspired some resistance in recent years. The portrayal of white privilege in Fair and Lovely ads prompted outcry from women's groups and intellectuals. Modeling agencies point to the success of dark-skinned Indian model Ujjwala Raut, though her skin is often saturated by bright bulbs for photo shoots. And new, edgier films have begun employing darker actors in leading roles.

Although most urban women appear to be diving headlong into the new beauty culture, others have interpreted their new independence - increasingly as salaried college graduates - in feminist terms.

Radhika Basu, a mahogany-brown graduate student at the Indian Institute of Management, says she feels little pressure to whiten her skin.

On a recent afternoon at an upscale New Delhi coffee bar, Basu, 24, sat in a corner reading The Da Vinci Code over iced coffee. Images of buxom, light-skinned women flashed on a screen tuned to Indian MTV. A caramel-toned teenage couple adored each other at a nearby table. The young man, Akhil Sachar, says he feels "blessed" by his complexion.

Basu says friends used to tease her about her skin, "grandmothers, too."

The taunts would hurt her feelings. But no more, she says. With her education and "because of the kind of person I am," she says she feels comfortable in her skin.

"I am single, and if I went in for arranged marriage, I may come across people who would prefer a fair bride," she says. "But then I'd hate to marry into such a family anyway."

Original URL: http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/front/12102461.htm