Cosmetics and Skin Lighteners

Following decades of pervasive advertising promoting the power of lighter skin, a re-branding is hitting shelves globally. But it’s unlikely that fresh marketing by the world’s biggest brands in beauty will reverse deeply rooted prejudices around “colorism,” the idea that fair skin is better than dark skin.

 Cosmetics companies have been selling a fairy tale that goes  like this: If your partner has lost interest in you, if your colleagues dismiss you at work, if your talents are ignored, whiten your skin to turn your love life around, boost your career and command center stage.

Unilever’s Fair & Lovely brand sells millions of tubes of skin lightening cream annually for as little as $2 a piece in India and earns the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate more than $500 million in yearly revenue in India alone.

Kavitha Emmanuel founded the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign in India more than a decade ago to counter perceptions that lighter skin is more beautiful than naturally darker skin. She said multinational companies like Unilever did not initiate skin tone bias, but have capitalized on it.

Unilever said it is removing words like “fair”, “white” and “light” from its marketing and packaging, explaining the decision as a move toward “a more inclusive vision of beauty.” Unilever’s Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Unilever Limited, said the Fair & Lovely brand will instead be known as “Glow & Lovely.” Unilever said in its announcement that it recognizes “the use of the words ‘fair’, ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don’t think is right.” Instead, the statement referred to products that deliver “glow, even tone, skin clarity and radiance.” French giant L’Oreal followed suit, saying it too would remove similar wording from its products. Johnson & Johnson said it will stop selling Neutrogena’s fairness and skin-whitening lines altogether. The U.S.-based Proctor & Gamble, which sells Olay brands “Natural White” and “White Radiance”, declined to comment when asked whether it had plans to re-brand globally.

The makeover is happening in the wake of mass protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd. It’s the latest in a series of changes as companies rethink their policies amid Black Lives Matter protests, which have spread around the world and reignited conversations about race.

For women raised on these fixed standards of beauty, the market is awash in products and services that can both brighten pigmentation from skin damage and outright lighten skin.

At the Skin and Body International beauty clinic in South Africa, owner Tabby Kara said she sees a lot of people inquiring about going one or two shades lighter. Throughout Africa and Asia, darker skin has been associated with poor laborers who work in the sun.

“It’s a general demand in Africa,” she said. “People do want to be a bit fairer simply because society expects or is more interested in the fairness of a person.”

India’s cultural fixation with lighter skin is embedded in daily matrimonial ads, which frequently note the skin tone of brides and grooms as “fair” or “wheatish” alongside their height, age and education.

The ancient Hindu caste system has helped uphold some of the bias, with darker-skinned people often seen as “untouchables” and relegated to the dirtiest jobs. The power of whiter, fairer skin in many countries was further reinforced by European rule, and Bollywood film stars who’ve featured in skin lightening ads.

In Japan, pale translucent skin has been coveted since at least the 11th Century. So-called “bihaku” products, based on the Japanese characters for “beauty” and “white,” remain popular today among major brands.

The high-end Tokyo-based skin care brand Shiseido says none of its “bihaku” products contain ingredients that bleach skin, but do reduce melanin that can lead to blemishes. The company says it has no plans to change its product names, including the “White Lucent” line, simply because other global companies have done so.

In South Korea, the words “whitening” or “mibaek” have been used in about 1,200 kinds of cosmetics products since 2001, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. About $283 million worth of “mibaek” products were manufactured last year in South Korea, the ministry has said.

https://apnews.com/a72b0f39d637a45cb48710d4229bf373