Skin lightening is serious business in India
| 9:15 AM on 07/19/2010 | |
A doctor uses a machine to heat up the skin of a patient receiving treatment to lighten her skin at a clinic in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Wednesday, July 8, 2009. (AP Photo/Hassan Ammar)
For most African-Americans, it's hard to comprehend that India of all countries would struggle with issues surrounding light and dark skin. So many of us simply associate such realities with our own communities and don't realize that those issues also play out in other parts of the world. But the ample press that a Facebook page, officially known as "Vaseline Men Be Prepared", aimed at Indian men, not women, allowing them to upload their pictures and then adjust it to see how Vaseline products can lighten their skin for a "fairer" or "whiter" complexion, has generated certainly proves just how pervasive this issue truly is. Interestingly, many of the reports in this company have not centered upon the psychology of why skin lighteners are such a viable market in India. Instead, the prevailing question is: why would a product as respectable as Vaseline exploit that psychosis?
The easy answer is "profit". And, let's be clear, skin lightening products in India are very profitable. In fact, so much so that, even before this Facebook page appeared, BBC News had done a story about the market as early as 2003. Therefore, Vaseline isn't doing anything that is deemed culturally insensitive in India. It's quite the opposite. Pankaj Parihar, representing the global advertising firm Omnicom which designed the campaign, shared that "the response has been pretty phenomenal" with Agence Presse-France when questioned about the campaign that launched in the second week of June.
Back in the U.S., as previously suggested, the response hasn't been so rosy. Many Americans, white and black, are simply appalled. Given our knowledge of racism in this country, we understand that this market exists in India precisely because of racism. Like many other countries of color throughout the world, India has an entrenched history of colonialism and the preference for lighter skin is a lingering vestige of that. While many of us feel that it is in extremely poor taste for Vaseline to capitalize on that, we must realize that it's not very different from what the cosmetic industry does on a regular basis.
One does not need smooth skin to navigate life. It's desirable because, for women especially, men find smooth skin attractive. Last year, the Indian matrimonial site Shaadi.com conducted a poll of nearly 12,000 people and skin tone was the most important criteria for choosing a partner in three northern Indian states. For most of us in the United States, we don't really notice the difference in skin tone of most Indians. Even in the Facebook ad, Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur doesn't appear that dramatically lighter from image to image. In India, however, the slightest change is dramatic.
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