Lighten up!

Actor Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood's answer to Tom Cruise, has recently come under fire for promoting Fair and Handsome, a skin-lightening cream targeted at men and sold in India and Indian shops around the world (the ad is viewable on Youtube here and speaks for itself). The ads for Fair and Lovely, the original cream for women from which F&H was spun off, aren't much better. Here's a particularly horrible one I found in English (with equally cringe-worthy runners up viewable in the related videos at the end):

The obsession with fairness is fed from all directions. Bollywood actors and actresses, the accepted benchmark for beauty, are invariably light-skinned (and don't tell me Bipasha Basu is "dark"). I can probably count on one hand the number of matrimonial ads I've seen that don't contain the word "fair", either to make the spouse-seeker seem more attractive or to specify what kind of husband or wife they're looking for.

I find it amazing that in this day and age, while we all boast happily about how modern and progressive India is, attitudes of this kind are still so widespread. And it's not just India - skin lightening treatments are big business everywhere from China to the Caribbean. I'm not sure if it's some prolonged post-colonial hangover or if it reaches back even farther than that.

Every culture has its own yardsticks of beauty, whether it's complexion or body shape or foot size, and most of us are hard pressed to measure up to our society's ideal of "beautiful". That exclusivity is one reason why beauty is so ardently worshipped. But in a world that's come leaps and bounds in recent decades in matters of race, measuring someone's beauty and worth by their skin colour seems unacceptable to me.