Unilever, Johnson & Johnson retreat on pushing lighter skin

Beauty products marketed abroad have drawn criticism.

As major consumer products companies have rushed to declare their opposition to racism in response to the national outrage over the killing of George Floyd, many of them have been accused of openly promoting a beauty standard rooted in racism and discrimination.

Unilever, Procter & Gamble, L’Oreal and Johnson & Johnson — some of the world’s biggest advertisers — sell beauty products that advocate lighter, whiter skin in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Those products are not marketed in the United States, but the sales of the skin lighteners have drawn criticism, especially from South Asians, for perpetuating colorism — the term describing the preference for lighter skin — in other countries, under popular brand names like Pond’s, Olay, Garnier and Neutrogena, and their own labels like Fair & Lovely.

The backlash appears to be forcing action. Unilever said Thursday that it would remove the words “fair/fairness, white/whitening, and light/lightening” from product packaging and communications and change the name of its Fair & Lovely brand, a juggernaut in India that has marketed lighter skin as a path to success for decades. Unilever has also sold skin-lightening products through Pond’s and Vaseline.

“We recognize that the use of the words ‘fair’, ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don’t think is right, and we want to address this,” said Sunny Jain, Unilever’s president of beauty and personal care.

The move followed Johnson & Johnson’s announcement last week, following questions from BuzzFeed News, that it would no longer sell its Neutrogena Fine Fairness and Clean & Clear Fairness lines, which were advertised as dark-spot reducers but also used to lighten skin.

Procter & Gamble, which sells similar products under its Olay brand, declined to comment. L’Oreal, whose Garnier site in India includes a “whitening” section for men’s face wash under the PowerWhite brand, did not return requests for comment.

The focus on skin-lightening products has emerged as U.S. brands reckon with their use of racial stereotypes involving Black Americans on popular products.

In South Asia, anti-blackness and colorism have origins that predate colonialism and systemically reinforce differences in caste and class.

Padma Lakshmi, the longtime host and executive producer of “Top Chef,” recently spoke out against such products, and in a phone interview said that colorism permeated her childhood in India. Once she got to the United States, she said, “I never felt that I was on any comparable level to my white peers because of my skin color, because I got that message in so many different ways, subtle and overt.”

AJC FILE 2017 The focus on skin-lightening products has emerged as U.S. brands reckon with their use of racial stereotypes involving Black Americans.