World India’s Disturbing Obsession with Fair Skin

[kotor]

India’s Disturbing Obsession with Fair Skin

The new Miss America would have a hard time being Miss India
By TIME Video Sept. 19, 2013

While some Americans have made bitterly racist remarks about Miss America Nina Davuluri based on the color of her skin, it seems that people in India have problems with her dark skin as well. Some even speculate that Davuluri wouldn’t have been fair-skinned enough to win a pageant in her parents’ home country.

Take a look at previous Miss India winners and the vast number of skin-whitening products promoted by Indian celebrities, and it quickly becomes clear: the country is obsessed with fair skin. According to dermatologist Jamuna Pai, who has clinics in various locations in India: “Unfortunately, in our country, they think looking better means you have to look fairer.”

http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/09/19/miss-america-is-too-dark-to-be-miss-india/

[Kabul]

India has OWD confirmed 2015

[kotor]

Indian obsession for fair skin continues
IANS | Apr 17, 2014, 09.00AM IST


Indian attitudes don't change: Whitening products continue to sell
Matrimonial advertisements for "fair girls" or commercials of beauty brands glamourising the light skin show that the obsession for fair skin persists among women in India despite a majority of Indian women being of brown or dark pigment.

According to market researchers ACNielsen, in 2010, India's whitening-cream market was worth $432 million (Rs.2,600 crore). In 2012, Indians were said to have consumed 233 tonnes of skin-whitening products.

"The fairness creams marketing strategies, which show that a girl can't get married unless she is fair, change the mindset of individuals. The visual media has changed the strategy so much that even fair people also use fairness products," Ravi Mittal, managing director of SKEYNDOR India, a Spanish skincare brand, said.

Although anti-ageing skincare products are doing well, whitening products selling fast. "Whitening skincare products account for approximately 56 percent of the market," Mittal said.

Age is no bar in such cases and Mittal has observed that women from teens to middle-age are all part of the 'who is the fairest' race.

Veena Kumaravel, founder of the Naturals salon chain, seconds this.

"People are coming in and asking for skin lightening treatments. Whether they are from south or north India, people want to look fairer than what they are. We can't make them absolutely fair as we don't do chemical peels and all. We remove the tan, which makes the skin lighter and brighter," she said.

Facials are the first service women prefer and lightening treatments are demanded by 90 percent of women in their 20s before their weddings.

"Women get tanned and so they go for such treatment. In the south, the skin texture is not dry and the weather doesn't change much so they don't need moisturising facials. They instead opt for lightening ones. In the north, winter is more about moisturising, but otherwise for special occasions, they want skin lightening treatments," Kumaravel said.

Some of the whitening services offered by Naturals are Young Radiance at Rs.1,400 and Magical Spark, which costs around Rs.600.

Geetika Mittal Gupta, dermatologist and director of International Skin and Anti-Aging Centre (ISAAC), said the demand for whitening treatments like Photofacials and Vitamin C peel Facials has gone up manifold.

"Photofacial costs Rs.5,000 and Vitamin C peel Facial is priced at Rs.3,000. The demand has gone up over the past few years for such whitening treatments," she said.

Gupta said the treatment is safe as it is carried out under medical supervision, but advised to strictly follow after-care routine.

"Photofacial is one of the best medi-facials that not only fights the early signs of ageing but also enhances the glow of your skin. Lasers are most effective because of their controlled accuracy and strength in targeting deep layers below the skin's surface. It is like getting rid of your imperfections from inside out, and there's more of a predictable outcome as compared to chemical peels or micro-dermabrasion," Gupta said.

"Your skin type makes a lot of difference and on an average three to five sessions are suggested a month apart. With little or no down time, this treatment is fairly comfortable," she added.

Vitamin C peel Facial, on the other hand, is imbibed with properties of vitamin C and fruit acids; so it is beneficial to the skin. It also helps remove pigmentation.

While the services offered at salons and clinics have been declared safe by experts, this can't be said about all the fairness creams available in the market.

"Many fairness creams are made of bleaching agents and ingredients which are banned in Europe as they lead to skin sensitivity and hyper-pigmentation. Many fairness products come with steroids which in the long run would lead to skin damage," Mittal pointed out.

So, if you still wish to be a part of the herd, do it with care.

[Linebacker]

Why would they care so much,fair skin is a nightmare to have,especially in the hot climate they live in there.

A pale skin person will get skin cancer living there.

[kotor]

Why Is A Nation of Brown People Obsessed With White Actresses?

‘It would be wrong to blame only Bollywood or the fairness cream industry, or the masses that cater to both, because clearly, all of us encourage this lust for whiteness that films and companies only cash in on’ says Paloma Sharma

Mickey Virus came to the theatres on October 25 and with it came the college-boy craze for one of Bigg Boss Season Seven’s foreign residents – Elli Avram.

Born Elisabet Avramidou Granlund to a Greek father and a Swedish mother, Avram is only one of the many non-desi women who have found stardom in Bollywood (whilst still being relatively unknown in their respective countries of origin). This is not because of their amazing acting skills, but because of something most Indian actresses will never really achieve – white skin.

Whilst Avram (thankfully) plays a foreign woman in the film, it is not so for the numerous other white actresses of Bollywood. Half-Indian, half-British (although Ayesha Shroff would like to disagree) and Bollywood’s darling these days, Katrina Kaif, is perhaps the most famous of these.

Not only has Kaif played women of Indian origin right from Boom to Namaste London and, lately, in Jab Tak Hai Jaan, but she has found herself a place in India’s $638 million fairness cream market.

Kaif was signed as the face of Olay's Natural White cream from a new line of cosmetics titled ‘White Radiance’.

Ironically, Kaif was quoted in a report saying, 'Be it a skin, hair or a jewellery product, I am very selective about the brands I endorse. I undertake extensive research on the company and try to ensure that the brand delivers on its promises made to the user of the product.'

Right.

But Kaif isn’t the only one.

Hazel Keech (born Rose Dawn) who is half British, a fourth Mauritian, a fourth Indian and grew up in London, has been in films like Bodyguard, Billa and Maximum, though she’s never had a lead role in Bollywood yet.

Fellow-British national, Amy Jackson, however, has been a hell of a lot luckier.

Jackson has no Indian ancestry at all. Winner of the Miss Teen World Pageant, she got her break in Bollywood when director Gautham Menon remade his Tamil film in Hindi and cast her opposite Prateik Babbar in Ekk Tha Deewana.

Incidentally, Jackson played a Malyali Nasrani Christian (and one wonders if the bad tan job was intentional). Jackson has stated in an interview, "I love India, it's my new home.”

Ms Jackson isn’t the only one making India her new home. Brazilian models Giselli Monteiro and Izabelle Leite, who could be easily mistaken for each other (or maybe that’s just my all-white-people-look-the-same-to-me syndrome) have played Indian women in Bollywood films.

Monteiro was spotted by director Imtiaz Ali and went on to play Harleen Kaur, a Punjabi girl, opposite Saif Ali Khan in Love Aaj Kal while Leite starred in the coming-of-age thriller-drama Sixteen.

While nationalist parties are outraged over white actresses and junior artists being cast in films over local ones, Jag Mundra (who incidentally made the critically acclaimed Provoked! Yikes!) was quoted saying, “The reason producers pick white girls is because a lot of them have better figures and are willing to expose them...If you need a bikini shot, not many Indian girls are willing to turn up in a string bikini. But most white girls will not have an issue with that. Titillation has been an important part of Bollywood."

With the preference for white actresses increasing, the ever-growing fairness cream market, and our own actresses bleaching their skin beyond recognition, it is rather amusing how quick we Indians are to jump up and scream, “Racist” when Ashton Kutcher does a brownface.

While India celebrated when Nina Davuluri, a first-generation Indian-American born to Telugu parents, won the Miss America crown, we forgot how Lakshmi Menon was turned away from the Indian fashion industry for being too dark.

We forgot that Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who famously went on Tyra Banks’s show and called fairness creams racist, has endorsed L’Oreal’s skin whitening product called White Perfect – that’s right, White Perfect – along with Lux White Glow.

We felt sympathy for Priyanka Chopra when she claimed she faced racist comments from schoolmates in America, but when she was seen in Pond’s White Beauty and Garnier’s Light Ultra, we brushed it off as “she’s just doing her work” or “everybody does things for money”.

As a brown Indian woman I cannot but ask these actresses if they have no pride in who they are and why they are so ashamed of their skin. Why they, who have travelled the world, who obviously know about the struggles of coloured people, choose to endorse products that tell people, especially women, that in order to be beautiful, confident and happening, one absolutely must be white?

At the same time I wonder if the foreign born-and-brought-up actresses (often with no knowledge of Hindi) who are routinely seen playing Indian girls, realise the implications of it.

I secretly believe that they must, given that they had spent their formative years in a society where racism has been a serious point of debate for some time now.

When white women play white women, it means nothing to me but when a white woman, who looks vaguely Indian, decides to tan herself to an appropriate level and tries to portray a brown woman, a woman like me, I think she forgets that my skin is not an accessory she can play with from time to time and take it off when she gets bored of it.

We brown women don’t have that option, we are not as privileged. We don’t get to shed off our brownness.

With our skin comes a memory of oppression, exploitation and practical slavery under colonial rule and the silent understanding that there are some positions in life that we will never be considered for. With our skin comes the realisation, ever since we were born, that we will never truly be beautiful.

It would be wrong to blame only Bollywood or the fairness cream industry, or the masses that cater to both, because clearly, all of us encourage this lust for whiteness that films and companies only cash in on.

But, as a matter of ethics and basic humanity, I appeal to people who know better to consider the impact that they have on the lesser mortals of the world, because when you’re brown in India, it’s not easy to “love the skin you’re in”. Unless you’re at a Russel Peters show, of course.

http://www.rediff.com/movies/column/why-is-a-nation-of-brown-people-obsessed-with-white-actresses/20131104.htm

[Gaston]

India has OWD confirmed 2015

No, dark Indians want to look like light Indians. Just watch a Bollywood movie (mute the sound :rolleyes:). There is no link with Europeans.

[kotor]

A History of Fair-skin Preference in South Asia

Recently, the Vogue India magazine’s cover took head on the well-known preference for lighter or fairer skin as a sign of beauty in the subcontinent. This preference has been commented on before, with many interpretations of the phenomenon. In this case, for example, one interesting insight by the piece linked above talks about the capitalization of this preference by beauty product companies.


Fuelled by the appearance of light-skinned Bollywood stars and models, the demand for skin-whitening creams – from brands including L’Oreal and Unilever – grew 18 per cent last year and is set to increase by a predicted 25 per cent this year, the Times reports.

This is a significant aspect of the phenomenon. There are billboards, magazine ads, and TV commercials throughout South Asia that play on the standard of ‘fairer’ skin being more attractive. This fits a standard post-WWII late-capitalist model of subjectivity construction. A standard of the body is set as either preferred or as undesirable, marketing sets out to construct a narrative with the aim of inducing anxiety about reaching the standard (cover up undesirables, concern to reach desirables), and products are disseminated to temporarily relieve this anxiety. But, of course, there are so many things to be anxious about, late-capitalism aims to make us perpetually anxious consuming subjects. This narrative is pretty standard and is playing out in the particular case of fairer skin in the subcontinent. However, we do have to be attentive to the local conditions that make this particular manifestation play out in the way it does. So, to my mind, any analysis of this phenomenon should take into account a number of historical trajectories that impact light-skin beauty standards in India.

1. In the Vedic material, we see a quite explicit differentiation between the light-skinned Aryans and the darker-skinned indigenous populations that the Aryans are said to have conquered. The narrative of the Vedas here clearly connects the notion of nobility and skin color. Aryan can be translated as ‘noble’ and has associations that me might analyze as class differentiation (in a very broad definition of class here). To have light skin is to be more associated with the Aryans. And thus throughout Indian history, as people refer back to the Vedas this association becomes reified and becomes loosely connected with status and purity/pollution.

2. In the colonial period we see the solidification of caste as an ideological standard and the previously loose connection becomes more crystallized. Shudras (lower castes) are associated with dark skin and Brahmans/Ksatriya (‘warrior’ caste) with lighter skin. Much of this has to do with the colonial essentialization and privileging of the Vedic textual material. The Vedas become read in the 19th century as the prehistory of Europe itself. Just as race becomes increasingly an important category in European discourse the Europeans are encoding race with data from the Vedas. We see these connections, of course, being applied most efficiently with German Romanticist Orientalism that led to the particular ways that Nazi-Socialism constructed its mythological history.

3. So, connected to the indigenous South Asian understandings of lighter vs. darker skin we find, in the colonial period, this being connected to a more global construction of racial identity such that the most fair, the European, becomes intersected with the model first spelled out in the Vedas. Attach the subtle play of representational power that connects global capital power and domination with the light-skinned European and we have a doubly-reflected semiology of light-skin being connected to privilege (from Aryans and from Europeans).

4. Finally, the Vedic connection between fair-skin and Aryans, as read by Europeans and certain elite Pandits, was then foiled against the Indo-European hypothesis where the Aryans, who spoke Indo-European Sanskrit, had conquered the darker-skinned Dravidians. This was connected to their contemporary South Asian setting, where the fairer North Indians are in some ways still set off against the darker skinned South Indians. An underlying tension between North and South India is connected too with this skin pigmentation symbolism since the colonial period.

Feministing has an ad in their analysis by Fair and Lovely, a company that markets skin-lightening cream:

If you watch the ad, you can see an number of themes reflected here

1. The father and “darker-skinned” daughter wear more ‘traditional’ garb, as opposed to the ‘modern’ , ‘lighter’ skinned clothes of the obviously higher-status people in the video.

2. The father gets his skin-lightening inspiration from some sort of ancient text, which connects back to many of the points I make above. Interestingly, this can be analyzed as a kind of reference to the antiquity of the preference for light-skin, or the valorization of tradition that is often necessitated to validate accepting ‘modern’ ideas. Also note that this is explicitly referencing the romanticization of Ayurvedic medicine as a privileged source of special knowledge applicable to the too-modern contemporary scene.

3. Once the daughter’s skin is lighter, she dresses ‘modern’ or even ‘western’. Again, we see the subtle connection between Aryan/European as light-skinned.

4. This is also a narrative of acceptance and assimilation into the globalized Euro-american bourgeois middle-class equivalents in post-colonial settings. The narrative plays out as the father and daughter seem like supplicants in the architecturally ‘modern’ skyscraper’. This is contrasted to their ‘traditional’ home architecture. Once her skin is lighter, the daughter can become part of this bourgeois in-group. Again, this is the connection of identity and capitalist anxiety. The goal is not to overturn the modern/tradition divide, but to become part of and excel within the ‘modern’ part of the binary through the use of romanticized ancient Ayurvedic inspired skin-lightening cream (which it obviously isn’t). It seems to me that this commercial is not much different than the modern Hollywood high-school cinderella story where the protagonist becomes accepted by the popular crown through the strategic use of his/her non-standard local knowledge (i.e. nerd, or artist).

5. She gets the man. She travels on a plane. Class, race, bourgeois hopes and dreams, fame. These become symbols of success. And the first step is skin-lightening cream.

So, there is a lot of complex things going on here, and this is just a sort of basic analysis. What I find so interesting about this particular commercial is the incessant continual semiotic referencing of the modern/traditional binary. I think this commercial is an excellent site to analyze the way that modern and traditional are not natural or given categories, but rather a constructive ideological binary pair that is continually put into strategic play in order to motivate and construct subjects in certain ways. Contrast this commercial, for example, with nationalist movements which often privilege the traditional over the modern (of course in a very selective way) in order to mobilize people for quite different ends. Honestly, there is so much to say about that topic, it could be its own post.

The last thing I want to note is the irony that the women on the cover of the India Vogue magazine are not really all that dark in the spectrum of South Asian skin-color variety.

https://fuzzytheory.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/a-history-of-fair-skin-preference-in-south-asia/

[Kabul]

No, dark Indians want to look like light Indians. Just watch a Bollywood movie (mute the sound :rolleyes:). There is no link with Europeans.

Exactly, they have OWD. Also, Indians = Indo-Aryan speakers, shouldn't that mean that Nordicists should be getting down on their knees to suck Indian dick?

[jatt]

oooo gawdddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggg ggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


NOONE FUCKING WANNA LOOK LIKE EUROPEAN WHITE.. dark Indians wanna look northern indian like... we aint from Africa anyways.

[♥ Lily ♥]

India purchases a lot of skin bleaching products.
Also, nations like Japan, Korea, the Caribbean Islands, black Americans and black British people buy a lot of skin lightening products too, and they wear coloured eye lenses, and straight horse-hair extensions in their hair to look like white people. I think they have Michael Jackson syndrome.
They go around slandering the minority white people in this world and then try to make themselves look white. :rolleyes:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z269dOL9r_k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ7IHJKsFW8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT7x1BIEhY0