We live in a country where the obsession with the colour white is sickening/maddening/incessant.
Some brilliant and cunning individuals know how to encash on the insecurities and miseries women have internalised, owing to society’s obsession with fair skin and the general mindset that being ‘fair’ means being pretty. I’m talking about the people who run the beauty industry. The first step to sell their products is to make people realise that they’re ugly, plain ugly. So, they start defining beauty in their own non-beautiful ways.
There have been television shows and advertisements that have sold the myth of lightening the skin tone and aroused feelings of self-hatred among the majority of young girls and women in our country. Let there stand a girl, white as snow, with flawless skin and say, “If you want to be like me, use this fairness cream!”.
And bingo, girls/women/men/old men/old women go and get the damn fairness cream already!
We don’t realise that this is all a farce, and not all that these ‘factory people’ say is true. I have my deemed reasons to call it a factory. The term industry is a positive word that signifies growth and development, and fairness cream factories are way too far from any progress. What the basic overview is, “Gora Nikhar Badhaye”, but now let’s be smart, we’re in the 21st-century – we can do better than falling for this crap. And how is it even possible to change the way you look or the skin tone you were born with?
It’s impossible for some cream to enable fairness on the face. All of us talk about feminism and equality. And then, what do we do? Promote a factory that tells us that we’re imperfect unless we plonk money on their product. Something that seems so useful to us but in reality it’s as worthless as an air conditioner in the cold.
Skin lightening creams are products that earn profit out of misery. How sadistic is that!
The only silver lining to this cloud is that misery has generated some employment if nothing else. Little girls under the influence of television ads, use powders and what not to turn white. And this is heartbreaking. Kids aged five or six have started thinking that they’re not beautiful enough! Beauty is skin deep, but who cares? What we shall care about is how white are we. I don’t understand the cause of all this, is it the fascination with the west or something else?
This beauty myth doesn’t make any sense, it’s nothing but a mindless hoax, and it’s on us to decide if we want to fall for the farce or stand up for what’s right.