The Post Colonial Hangover: Asian Obsession with Fair Skin

By Arushi Khosla April 28, 2010

Warning: This is most probably going to be extremely India-centric.  But I think it’s important to explore topics such as these so as to appeal to a global audience.

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It’s a typical Saturday. You’re walking through the various stalls of Dior, Chanel and Guerlain and staring, bewildered at the glossy posters of fair Indian women preening for the camera, wondering why there isn’t a single dark-skinned beauty in sight. It’s a similar tragic story while watching a movie or going to a fashion show.

The skin lightning industry spans all of Asia, a $190 million industry, inflicting people with an excruciating sense of self-doubt and thriving spectacularly on their insecurities. Demeaning and insulting products such as “Fair & Lovely”, its derivatives and their usage have become practically synonymous with beauty and desirability. The advertisements for such products are shocking and infuriating; women are shown not to be able to succeed in any facet of life, including seemingly unrelated things such as job prospects for lack of unrealistically light skin. The message stands loud and clear: Dark equates to ugly and dull. Unless you’re fair, you can’t be happy or successful.

It consequently seems sort of comical how a substantial amount of my friends in the States and Europe berate themselves incessantly for being too pale and just never tan enough. We, however, associate fairness with the bourgeoisie aristocracy. In the West, dark skin is now appreciated, complimented and even envied! It’s considered “exotic and beautiful”. In those countries, darker skin is considered more desirable because it is associated with rich people who can afford to go on big beach vacations to exotic locales and catch rays while sunning in yachts. It’s actually kind of sad that this kind of racism is perpetuated and encourage by the very people who face discrimination.

These medieval thought processes can be clearly traced back to the colonial period in India, what with British viceroys reining supreme, seemingly superior because of their skin color. History is testament to the fact that men lording it over India have always been white, be it the Aryans and Persians earlier, succeeded by the Mugals or the Europeans in the later years. Evidently, this feeling of inferiority never left our mind sets.

This absurd idea has been carried on into present times for unidentifiable reasons unknown to the rest of mankind. We ourselves, a country of brown skinned people, constantly reiterate the tired old notion of “fair is beautiful”. We are, subconsciously and unknowingly driven by racial prejudices against our own ethnic color.

Let’s take an example. I find it ludicrous that a model as stunning as Lakshmi Menon struggled for years in India, owing to her naturally dark skin, of course, until finally catching her big break in New York and thereafter going on to become one of the biggest names in European fashion.

Let’s take a more relatable example. Open up a newspaper and skim past to matrimonial section. Not one person admits to being dark. They are either “wheatish” or “fair”. Oh, and now men don’t need to embarrass themselves by using women’s creams! They have “Fair & Handsome”! It’s a total joke.

“It’s all about what sells. Women want to be tall, thin and white” says a marketing executive at a fairness company. The idiocy of the statement may be overwhelming, but it would be silly to overlook the fact that it is abundantly clear that it’s true. A lot of us  have been brought up to believe that if you’re fair, you’re subsequently pretty. It’s been slowly and steadily drilled into our minds. In the summer, you’re taught how to get rid of your tan. Indian songs, movies and books depict the female protagonists as fair and beautiful. Not fair or beautiful. After all, how can one exist without another?

With Oprah Winfrey being the most powerful woman in worldwide entertainment and Obama being the elected president of the world superpower, we continue to differentiate and dissect and be innately prejudiced. When did we start going backwards?

The apparent racist-driven Australian attacks on Indians created a major outcry here. The media had a field day reporting the attacks and blowing everything out of proportion and blaming the Australians for being prejudiced in this day and age. Yet we have decidedly no qualms in being pigheaded about out own people’s skin colors in a sickeningly superficial manner.

You would think we have come a long way from a time when fairness was considered superior as it meant not having to work in the sun, indicating royalty but apparently not.

We seem to be prejudiced, blatantly and overtly. This begs the question: Is Asia a land of closet racists?

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Submitted on April 28, 2010 in Celebrity Fashion.

TAGS: Asia, Estee Lauder, Fair and Lovely, Garnier, India, Katrina Kaif, Prejudice, Racism, Skin

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