A hundred years after it was first launched, Band-Aid belatedly realised that skin comes in many different colours. Now the largest selling cream in the world, Fair & Lovely seems to have realised – also very belatedly – what a toxic, racist mindset their product was helping to promote. Unilever is now changing the Fair & Lovely brand name because they want to celebrate the ‘diversity of beauty’. Is this too little too late?
Hindustan Unilever launched Fair & Lovely as a skin-lightening product with a melanin suppressor ingredient in 1975. This was widely available in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, countries of South-East Asia and elsewhere. Today, it has 80% market share in the fairness cream segment and earns Rs 4,100 crore annual revenue from India alone.
For decades now, the product has preyed on individual insecurities and the social stigma relating to darker skin tones. Their advertising has been routinely regressive; typically depicting the sad, dark, unsuccessful woman who transforms into a beautiful, confident, successful, happy person with the help of Fair & Lovely. In effect, it has fed into, encouraged and profited off colourism and just rank racism.
Now with the conversation taking place around racial and other biases all over the world, the company seems to have had a belated attack of conscience. Unilever has now announced that they will be dropping terms such as ‘fairness’, ‘whitening’ & ‘lightening’ from their products. In other words, they are changing the brand name and not the product. So in their book, the problem is in the name and not in the fact that a skin-lightening product exists.
This is of a piece with other cosmetics that have chosen to rename and rebrand their ‘fairness’ products and reposition them as products for enhancing ‘glow’, ‘radiance’ etc. etc. The company will continue to manufacture the same product and sell it to the same people with the same insecurities; no change there.
For decades now, the product has done very real damage to the self-esteem of millions of young kids & women – and men it must be acknowledged (there is also Fair & Handsome). These fairness products will continue to exist. By their existence, the message that ‘fair’ is a desirable ideal of ‘good looks’ will continue to go out. These products have helped foster the mindset that thinks nothing of putting ‘required, fair girl/boy’ in countless matrimonial adverts over the years.
There is also the view that Fair & Lovely cannot be blamed for colourism in society. They are a company manufacturing a product for which there is a high demand in the market. There are also those who think that asking for the withdrawal of such a product is political correctness gone too far. What’s next; banning lipsticks, they counter. According to this view, if a person wants to lighten or darken their skin, that should be their choice. This unfortunately misguided tweet seems to think that discontinuing a product is ‘appeasement’ (now an umbrella term for any policy that one disagrees with)
This is, of course, a false equivalency. In India, where light skin is connected to status, wealth and caste superiority, this is not just a product that caters to demand. It is a product that caters to and promotes a harmful and regressive mindset. It has for years, helped equate fair skin with happiness, success and self-confidence. It has helped perpetuate regressive thinking.
Right now, it seems as though the company is just trying to capitalise on the general mood of society as a whole. This is what is now being called performative activism; the attempt to earn brownie points with the help of some inexpensive virtue signalling. This is not the discontinuation of a product, merely the renaming of a product that continues to be what it was – a ‘solution’ for dark skin. It doesn’t destroy the myth that fair skin is somehow superior and desirable and that dark skin needs ‘correction’; it merely disguises that myth.
It’s basically old wine, new bottle. To mangle the words of the bard, what’s in a name? Fair & Lovely by another name would be as regressive.
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