from ad to worse

the dark-skinned girl will never get the moderately good-looking boy. she won’t get the job she deserves either. she will be ignored by peers and forgotten by friends. she may dream of becoming a doctor, but will lack the required confidence to walk into the nearest medical school. naturally, all of this will change soon after she begins to apply a fairness cream. things will start to look up even more after she purchases a fairness moisturiser. her life will then turn around. her friends will adore her. men will stop to stare; women to glare in envy. and, if she doesn’t believe the manufacturer’s claims, the endorsement from an a-list bollywood star will seal the deal.

to look for ethics in the advertising industry is a lot like trying to avoid a politician on a tour of tihar these days. anything that can be twisted to misrepresent reality, in any shape or form, can and will be twisted. despite decades of exposure to this sort of unadulterated garbage however, the sheer abundance of it spouted in fairness cream ads continues to surprise me. these are blatant untruths — for that is what they usually are — packaged and served up for our collective consumption every 15 minutes or so, yet no one feels the need to sit up and complain.

this absence of anguish can be traced to the obsession with skin tone that large numbers of us continue to nurture. black is unbearable. brown will simply not do. wheatish is a euphemism. only the magical ‘fair’ can make life bearable. according to recent figures posted at a site for advertising and marketing professionals — who, incidentally, refer to this as the snow white syndrome — the men’s fairness cream category alone is currently a rs 200 crore market. a year ago, the bbc pointed out that the indian whitening cream market was expanding at close to 18 percent annually.

the cost of it all is conveniently swept under the rug. most fairness creams can be differentiated from each other primarily on the basis of how much bleach they contain. they whiten the skin to a certain degree, but have the potential to cause irreversible damage with overuse. and yet, advertising continues to perpetuate the long-established cultural belief that fairness equals success. it’s why brides and grooms across the country, or their parents, continue to hawk or demand fair spouses.

now, even dark underarms are a problem; there is a fairness cream for that particular area. creams for fairer pelvic cavities no longer seem far-fetched.