The commercial starts
with a tan girl sitting sad and feeling miserable about her complexion.
Everyone at office or in her family avoids her; the girls make of of her while
the men ignore her. The girl is depressed and feels hopeless because she can’t
achieve anything and no one likes her. Why? Because she has a dark complexion. Then
her friend who is fair and pretty and everyone is friends with her comes to her
and consoles her on not be sad but use this ‘fairness’ cream which will work
wonders on her skin. She uses it and poof the magic cream does wonders to her
skin. She turns into a beautiful girl with fair and spot less skin
and suddenly achieves everything she wants in life; gets a dream job and all the
boys suddenly seem interested in her too! These advertisements have convinced
us that, if you have a dark complexion, you won’t be accepted in this society.
But is everything fair in the advertising game?
We are obsessed with
fairness and that is evident from the way these creams do brisk business in the
country. We must know how a person gets
skin colour. There is a pigment in the
body called Melanin. Now more the melanin in the skin the darker the skin is.
Melanin has its own useful effects like it blocks cancer causing rays of the
sun so you would find that coloured people get less skin cancer than white
people and also coloured people get less sun burns. Now fairness creams block
the Secretion of the melanin in the skin thus making it less coloured. A
warning issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) says that the
common ingredient in skin lightening products — mercury — can have
adverse effects such as kidney damage, reduction in the skin’s resistance to
bacterial and fungal infections, anxiety, depression or psychosis and also
peripheral neuropathy. Aroma Magic Fair Lotion, a product of Blossom Kochhar
Beauty Products Pvt Ltd, had the highest mercury level at 1.97 ppm, followed by
Olay Natural White (1.79 ppm), a product of Procter and Gamble, India, and
Ponds White Beauty (1.36 ppm) of Hindustan Unilever Ltd.
Where there is skin damage, there is also psychological damage
caused by such products. The dark side of the fairness products is that they do
not serve the purpose they are made for; no fairness cream or bar of soap can
change your skin colour. Your skin colour is natural just like your eye and
hair colour. When people use these products in an attempt to change their
complexion, temporarily they may work, but in the long term they wear off leading
to frustration, depression and the obsession of switching from one product to
another.
Many dermatologists feel
that suppressing the production of melanin can have adverse long-term effects.
Cosmetic products only polish the skin superficially. What is important is to
keep skin healthy and clean. Any tone is beautiful, whatever the
shade. Why else would Westeners vie for Asian skin tone and go for bronzers and
sun-tanned look?