The light and the dark of it all: our obsession with fairness

I’m the kind of Shahrukh Khan fan who has stuck with him through all kinds of horrendous movies like ‘Hum Tumhare Hain Sanam’ (which nobody remembers) and ‘Shakti: the Power’ (which everyone cringes to remember). But come 2007, I was almost ready to chuck my first love into the dustbin. Because Shahrukh Khan, of all people, had chosen to promote a men’s fairness cream, the first men’s cream of the sort!

Being born with wheatish skin, I don’t take fairness lightly (pun intended). Anyone who tries to steer me towards the fairness cream aisle was on the other side of the battle line. And all I could think when I saw Shahrukh Khan transforming from a grimy hunk to a pale (and for me, unflattering) shadow of his former self was: Et tu, Brutus? It didn’t help one bit that the cream was a runaway success, inspiring dozens of brands and stars to follow. I had no heart to gloat over how trailblazing my hero was. Because fighting the stigma of darkness is an uphill battle everyday, and he had just made things (more than slightly) harder by promoting fairness.

Thankfully, I had never thought my dark skin any less than fair skin. All the backhanded compliments that came my way (‘Kali bhayepani ramri’) made me feel more annoyed than inferior. Since my sister and I looked almost like twins, we joked that we were photocopies of each other. Some smartass had to come up with the punch line that no, I was in fact a carbon copy of my fair sister, never mind that I came into the world first. But since I found this joke funny and began sharing it with everyone, it kind of lost the punch for the jokester, which was quite fine by me.

But that doesn’t mean that being dark didn’t have its share of frustrations in our fairness-obsessed society. An entirely single teenage wasn’t easy on an already insecure youngster at an age when the slightest hurt can bruise the self-esteem deeply. I didn’t think to focus on my antisocial personality—which included a devastating dress sense and poor-to-none conversation skills—improving which would’ve done me much more good. Instead, I looked to the mirror for the answer to why, why, why, no boy ever found me worth half a look even until the ripe age of 22.

I never considered using fairness cream, because having a first crush who was very dark ensured that I always thought of dark as beautiful. But I felt that other people (read boys around me) didn’t share this view. This caused me to resent vapid boys who couldn’t look beyond the skin, boys in general (they must be all equally shallow!), friends who had healthy love lives (they don’t realize how shallow their love life is), fair friends in general (Oh, they think the world of themselves because they are fair!), and ultimately, the notion of romance itself. And that’s not a very healthy state of mind to be in, whatever age you are.

I was aware that dark-skinned women around me faced graver problems than lack of a date. Ushma Verma*, a 27-year-old management graduate, is often told by friends that she’s a black beauty. But her relatives aren’t so forgiving, and keep telling her parents that since she’s so dark, she should be married off soon. Since complexion is very important in Ushma’s community, they worry that she won’t get a groom.

Another friend of mine, who has a light wheatish skin that cannot even be classified as dark, shared her experience of inferiority complex during childhood. Nisha* hated being called kali, and would fight with anyone who dared to call her so. Another friend, Sapana, started using fairness cream because she felt that clothes don’t match well with dark skin.

Advertisements of fairness cream seem to be the connecting factor here, subtly influencing youngsters to believe that their natural skin isn’t good enough. A women had to be fair to get a job (even that of a cricket commentator, if one remembers a memorable ad starring then newbie Genelia D’Souza), to get to dance in the front (it doesn’t matter if you dance like an ape, you just need to be fair), to find true love (again, personality doesn’t count, only your rank on the fairness meter does), and even to be powerful (I remember a most annoying fairness cream ad with the tagline ‘Sundarta Shakti Hai’, yes, that’s the only kind of shakti we want our girls to aspire to having).

And if there’s any doubt to the power of these advertisements, one just need to look at the number of people using fairness creams, even those who are naturally fair.

Neeta Limbu, 25, is a student with a radiantly fair complexion. And yet, she’s been using L’Oreal fairness cream for over four years.

“Of course, I want to be fair. Who doesn’t?” she asks and continues to say that she hopes the cream will make her already fair skin more fair and attractive.

Sapana agrees that without these ads, she may have looked for options but wouldn’t have had the information about how to become fair. And looking back, I blame these ads more than anything else for my recurring bouts of insecurity about complexion.

When I went to the US, it was a relief to find these ads replaced by those for tanning creams. A friend from Ecuador remarked that she couldn’t understand why anybody wanted to be fair, when she tried all day in the sun to tan her skin! The hiatus helped strengthen my own ideas of beauty and heal my ideas about relationships.

But when I came back after four years, all prepared to fight the idealizing of fairness, I was shocked to see that the fight had gotten much harder. Now there are not only fairness creams for the face, but fairness body showers, fairness products for specific body parts (underarms, back, under-eye, you name it), fairness moisturizing lotions, fairness creams for specific age groups (teens and anti-ageing), for winter, for nights, and last but not the least, for intimate areas. The last one made me cringe, like really, does complexion really affect the quality of intimacy?

Dermatologist Dr. DB Pokharel informs that such cosmetics do work, but on a temporary basis. “They can’t make a naturally dark person fair,” he says. “But they do enhance a person’s complexion by making it brighter.” If used for a longer period without consulting a doctor, they may even harm the skin. Steroids have the side-effects of increasing hair growth while some creams are known the make the skin patchy. And none of them “goes deep into the layers to give your lasting fairness,” because all such chemicals work on the top layer of the skin called epidermis.

Despite these health risks, the explosion of these products tells us that this sector is booming, and men’s fairness cream segment is rapidly growing. One can only imagine the effects that messages have on impressionable young minds, especially when they are backed up by their favorite stars.

It’s not easy to keep your spirits up with people trying to prove that only fair is beautiful. But there are ways. They may call my complexion dark, but I prefer to call it ‘golden brown’ or ‘honey’ or ‘olive,’ which makes it sound exotic and happy. And we need more people like Ushma to resist her community’s pressures for early marriage on the basis of her complexion. She’s looking for someone who doesn’t go for outer beauty, but “knows the quality of diamonds.”

*Name changed

Published in Republica on September 5