A lighter shade of a dark skin tone
If you are not born with a face (read fair complexion) that you could call a fortune, don’t lengthen it further by sulking. For you have an entire industry out there to help you. Just visit your local super market and you will find aisles dedicated to skin lightening products with impressive formulations that include an extensive array of ingredients, including indigenous ayurvedic herbs, vitamins, collagen, hydroquinones, alpha hydroxyl acids, to name a few.
For your convenience, you have a choice of creams, lotions or gels all packaged in attractive jars, bottles and tubes. Further, you have day creams, night creams, sun creams and also specialised creams and lotions for under-eye, neck, hand, elbows and feet. Some products have to be applied in a particular sequence; they also have to be applied with correct hand movements and with the right pressure. All this is a small price to pay for achieving a spotless, blemish-free, lighter skin tone.
After all, as advertisers make us believe, a lighter skin tone is directly proportional to one’s self worth and a casual glance through the matrimonial page of a newspaper will convince you that in India, a fair complexion improves your prospects, opens job opportunities both in the glamorous industry of films, modelling, and hospitality and also in other professional fields.
If this mentality and the amount of money that is involved in the fairness products industry makes you cringe, now is the time to rejoice, as a leading company recently removed the words fair, skin lightening from India’s largest-selling fairness cream, Fair and Lovely. This is indeed an important step towards removing colourism from the collective psyche of the country where skin tones range from every shade of brown to black.
But will this step also change our mindset? Even those of us who claim not to be colour biased, while praising a dusky beauty, almost always say that her beautiful features and/or that lovely smile draws the attention away from her complexion.
In our country, the most revered Lord Krishna has been described as a dark-skinned God in scriptures and we have a folk heroine, Laila, who as her name suggests was dark complexioned. So when did our obsession with fair skin begin? It may be attributed to our rulers, the Mughals and later, the British. The rulers oppressed and discriminated against us on many accounts, including skin colour. A lighter skin tone was seen as being superior and hence beautiful, becoming a part of our mindset generations ago. Till today, light skinned babies, are affectionately given the moniker Angrez.
Interestingly, all skin tones have been celebrated in our folk songs. Just recall, ‘Gori diyan jhajhra bulandiyan gayian’ and also equally loved, ‘Kala shah kala, mera kala ae sardar, goryan nu dafaa karo mei aap tille di taar’.
US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr famously said: “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.” We too must learn to look beyond skin colour as was suggested decades ago in the song, “Hum kale hai to kya hua, dilwale hai.”
SO WHEN DID OUR OBSESSION WITH FAIR SKIN BEGIN? IT MAY BE ATTRIBUTED TO OUR RULERS, THE MUGHALS AND LATER, THE BRITISH