sfgate.com
NEW DELHI, INDIA, July 5, 2003: The pharmacy clerk pulls a box of skin lightening cream from a glass cabinet, places it on the counter and says it’s obvious why he sells so much of it. Women want to be beautiful and the key to that is inside the box, which has a series of drawings showing a woman growing pale to the point of near invisibility. “When a woman is more fair, she is more beautiful,” Vishnu Kayat says. Seemingly, much of India agrees. Throughout India images of fair-skinned women are everywhere, especially in the fashion and movie Industry. Even marriage ads are filled with requests for “fair-skinned” brides and families advertising their “fair-skinned” daughter. (Those not so fortunate are of “wheat” complexion, not “dark.”) Not surprisingly, sales of skin lighteners bring in more than US$100 million a year.
Not all Indians are comfortable with this celebration of fair skin, however, and the debate over the social divisions of skin tone has spilled into the media and politics. In a nation often tangled in its own cultural contradictions, it’s a schizophrenic debate, tied to questions of caste, colonialism and the global media invasion. The result? The past few years have seen both an increase in the use of white women as advertising models — and an increase in acceptance of dark skin as a sign of beauty. Lightness of skin tone has become a global issue as skin lighteners can be purchased from Tokyo to small towns in central Africa.