It’s been worrying me for ages, and now I realise I’m not the only one. If you walk into any chemist’s shop, or the ‘bathroom’ section of any supermarket, you’re assailed by “whitening” products: whitening moisturisers, whitening face wash, whitening everything.
And they’re obviously big news: every other billboard at the moment features Bollywood beefcake John Abraham showing us how he’s got “two shades fairer” thanks to the lovely people at Garnier. Meanwhile a recent tv advert had some other model’s face breaking up into quarter-inch squares, with those ghastly brown bits literally falling away to reveal the inner paler person within.
Now I know this is complex: there’s centuries of ethnic, caste and class history at play here, and I don’t understand the half of it: other people can write about that far better than me. But it’s still a tragic situation if India’s young, impressionable busy girls buying beauty are being led to think that happiness lies in a creating a pale imitation of themselves.
Is this really what you drove out the British for?
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2 comments:
Ironically most of my British female contemporaries are currently spending hideous amounts of money on bottles full of cream that claime to make your skin 'naturally' darker...
Well indeed. Perhaps we'll all meet in the middle in a beautiful shade of light brown.
Woody Guthrie wrote:
"All creeds and kinds and colors of us are blending
Till I suppose ten million years from now we'll all be just alike"
But in Woody's day there weren't fairness creams and tanning salons.
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