Whitewashing the world

“That, too, happens when a girl feels like, she walks by on the street, people look at her, and point out to her body, and say, “Oh? Tune waxing bhi nahin karai?” And then she starts feeling like something is wrong with her, like she is less beautiful than the diva in the class, than them, the ‘beautiful and popular girl crowd’, that she has to change to become ‘normal’. “Itne baal ho rahe hain tere. Bhalu bani padi rehti hai ye ladki to.”

It had to have been especially humiliating, if not depressing, to hear that you resemble a bear more than a human being, for an impressionable adolescent girl just starting her puberty. This point made by Mrs. Madhu hits home, who is an old Oriflame professional distributor. She has been working this job, selling skincare products for more than a decade now, she tells me as we sip hot tea in her brightly coloured bedroom.

“But before women weren’t required to wax to appear beautiful, right? Waxing is fairly recent in the list of common practises, isn’t that right?” The leading question doesn’t put her off at all as she speaks in the whippy way some Punjabis speak.

“Yes, yes, before it was considered healthy, even desirable, to have thick hair on your body. Haven’t you seen old black-and-white movies? The hero has a strapping chaati with thick hair on his chest. Having thick hair signified health and beauty. Even for women in that way. There was no concept of a hairless body in that time. That toh is happening now, that beauty means you have to take off all your hair.”

She continues speaking as catalogues litter the space between us on her bed. Flipping pages, she shows me reasonably priced products she thinks I would benefit from if I applied them, in her words. She knows that my brother is getting married in late November, so she is more excitable than usual to help me choose makeup appropriate to my skin colour.

“Nowadays there is full body waxing, polishing, and moisturising services available in a pre-bridal package. Along with hair treatments, and facials and everything, all these beauty parlours do is rack a long hefty bill and hand it over to you, saying, ‘This is how much money it has become.’ This is how I started in this business. An Auntie of mine roped me in, showing me beautiful products, about 12 years ago. She then ordered it all, gave me a list, and gave me the bill, saying, ‘This stuff is for 2000 rupees.’ I asked, ‘But when did I order all this?’ We were stuck and had to pay. It was a three-month membership. To attract more customers and recruit retailers into their work, she gave me a lot of free stuff too. So here we were, a whole host of skincare products, stacks and stacks, trying to finish them all. So we finished them. And then we realised how different, how gentle on the skin these products were. All the other products sold on the market, my daughter bought a new facewash, I tired to use it, I thought to myself, ‘What the hell have I put on my face?’ These products aren’t even put up on stores. They’re exclusive, and they sell well. Now that winter is coming, my permanent customers order in surplus to last them an entire season. You know, that milk and honey scrub, your mother liked? It can be used as a body wash, a scrub, and a face scrub! That one is ordered in droves.”

Absorbing all that she said took me a few slow moments. She seemed to sense that, so she silently and smilingly brought catalogues from the other room. The catalogues are full of sharp jawlines and blemish less faces with an array of dizzying colours and prices printed in bold. Thumbing through the smooth shiny pages makes me wonder, will I ever get to become as beautiful as they are?

“This compact comes in three colours. Beige, Rose, and Dark. For you I think rose is best. It’s for young girls. Nice blush will come out on your cheeks.” I wondered, is this how women have been made conscious of themselves? An offhand comment about one’s skin colour, taken root for even more dangerous thoughts to creep in the way creams seep into one’s skin?

Talking with employees of beauty parlours left me with having to either educate them on what melanin was, or them giving me answers with no real depth. I could barely help them understand the question that this entire multi-crore industry was feeding off of their own, and our own, insecurities about our appearance which was brought on by various sources around us who tell us how we ‘should’ look, how would I possibly arrive at a place where they could share with me their own thoughts on the matter?

These were long-standing workers who had only received primary education, and having dropped it, to become workers to contribute to the family income, who often have six or eight siblings. An employee Medha* who works in a parlour Oxygen, near my house, tells me that she got into the whole beautician business simply because her family had a history of owning and managing beauty parlours. She was even hesitant to tell me the name of the training institute or the parlour where she had her training, though she alluded that it was the one her family owned.

Asking her and others deep-seated questions like- what do you think about this business of making people, mainly females, conform to and practise these strict ideas of what beauty means; yielded little to no comprehension and required me to dumb down the questions to ones with simple factual answers, but which, again, they seemed reluctant to answer. The beauty parlour I frequented, I assumed, would have the employees treating me as a friend, or at least, a person they knew and wouldn’t be suspicious of.

Social norms and practises, run so deep, I found, that they seemed to be near invisible to nail down and point out. That girls are raised to think of themselves as lacking until they properly wax themselves, spend thousands on beauty treatments, and since 2015 onwards, dye their hair an outrageous colour to assert their individuality and beauty, since now women are claiming to be ‘feminists’, and now independence of a woman is rapidly being constituted on the basis of how much they can indifferently spend on themselves.

Mrs. Madhu articulates these things fairly well as we sail through the long albeit comfortable interview in the midst of her fast and other house complications. I declare my respect for her as a working woman who also takes care of her three children, none of whom are married. Despite being tangential to my questions, her replies are far from useless and give me many insights on how ideas of skin and beauty have been shaped by Western thought and mainstream Hindu society.

Here’s a floral background to the Milk & Honey Scrub which she says ‘sells out in droves’:

Skin colour, which so many of us seem to give primacy to over any other factors of beauty, comes from melanin. Melanin is the pigment that gives human skin, hair, and eyes their colour. Dark-skinned people have more melanin in their skin than light-skinned people have. Melanin is produced by cells called melanocytes. It provides some protection again skin damage from the sun, and the melanocytes increase their production of melanin in response to sun exposure. Freckles, which occur in people of all races, are small, concentrated areas of increased melanin production.

Melanin also has an interesting relationship to sunlight. As explained above, within the skin's epidermal (outer) layer are cells that contain the pigment melanin. Melanin also protects skin from the sun's ultraviolet rays, which can burn the skin, and over time, could reduce its elasticity and cause a person to age prematurely. Suntanning occurs because exposure to sunlight causes the skin to produce more melanin and to darken. The tan fades as these cells move toward the surface and are sloughed off.

So, in short, where you live, in other words, geographical boundaries determine what your skin colour comes out to be. Tropical climates generally have more sunlight, and hence the equator has the most dark-skinned people than anywhere else on the planet. As this pin on Pinterest points out, its title “Race=evolution of melanin level”:

Another conscious user of make-up, Mrs. Meher, points out, that India is just one of many countries which uses products like Fair & Lovely in an almost fanatical obsession to get a lighter skin tone. It is a skin-lightening cosmetic product of Hindustan Unilever introduced to the market in India in 1975. And it is certainly not restricted to India: China and Japan have had skin-whitening products for centuries, well before they met Western ‘white’ people. Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Brunei, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and other parts of Asia stock the cream, and it is also exported to other parts of the world such as the West, where they are sold in Asian supermarkets. The target consumer profile for Fair & Lovely is the 18 and above age group, and the bulk of the users are in the age 21–35 category, though there is evidence that girls as young as 12–14 also use the cream. Marketing for the product in all countries implies whiter skin equates to beauty and self-confidence. Hindustan Unilever Limited research claims that "90 percent of Indian women want to use whiteners because it is aspirational, like losing weight. A fair skin is like education, regarded as a social and economic step up." The promise, the big reward, is the guarantee of better marriage and employment prospects.

Fair and Handsome, its male counterpart, has seen fast increase in sales- 40% growth in the last six years, worth around 5,000 crore, of which fairness creams account for around 400 crores. Whitening creams and face washes for men are front and centre in India. Kolkata-based consumer goods major Emami has built an entire range of products under its decade-old Fair and Handsome brand, including a moisturising cream, an “instant fairness” face wash, and a winter product for dry skin. Many of these products are endorsed by Bollywood actors Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan.

“The men’s fairness segment came about because almost one-third of users of women’s fairness creams were men,” says Dheeraj Sinha, chief strategy officer at advertising agency Leo Burnett. “They simply transferred the already existing market.”

The international brand Nivea sells a wider range of products for men, including face washes, scrubs, and lotions that offer “oil control,” “all-in-one” solutions,” and “dark spot” reduction. However, of its five face cleansers, four carry the “10x whitening effect” label, while two of its three face creams carry the whitening tag. Outside India, the company focuses on selling products for sensitive or oily skin. HUL’s Pond’s brand also sells a men’s grooming range that has a few products that promise a whitening effect, alongside anti-pollution and oil control effects. Meanwhile, L’Oréal-owned Garnier’s portfolio is more diversified but a number of its products also promise skin whitening- five of eight products offer a fairness effect, according to information available on the company’s website. Brand experts believe that all these products are a reflection of India’s biased society. All these companies- Emami, Nivea, HUL, and L’Oreal- says Quartz, declined to respond to requests for comments when emailed.

The cultural pressure to look fair, argues Kiran Khalap, branding expert and founder at communications consultancy Chlorophyll, is something inherent in our society, not manufactured by companies.

In April 2017, Bollywood actor Abhay Deol took to Facebook to trounce his fellow actors who earn millions from endorsing fairness creams. This comes a few years after actress Nandita Das launched the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign to encourage Indians to embrace a wider definition of beauty. These efforts are slowly making a difference, increasing awareness and encouraging consumers to take pride in their natural skin tones. That means Indian companies will eventually have to change their approach. Rajesh Krishnamurthy, business head for the consumer product division at The Himalaya Drug Company, believes that over time the men’s grooming category will evolve to include a wider range of products, including those for normal skin, just like in the women’s skin care category.

I suspected that it was the effect of decades of colonialism and being oppressed that Indians felt the need to transform themselves into hairless creatures. That we look to the West to be inspired, to aspire to, to see them as examples, when what it is, is simply the eternal model of the white, heterosexual, European, a pinnacle of what it means to be human.  

Mrs. Madhu seemed to know what question I was going to ask next. What do you think about the fact that this multi-billion dollar costemics industry is fooling people every day, using well-known celebrities and creatively crafted advertisements to inject venomous ideas into our heads and promising results which we instinctively know won’t be physically possible? Do you feel like you are part of this industry or separate from it? Why?.....

I decided, this is a truth, one of those never publicly acknowledged, which sits in a drawer somewhere in our heads. All these truths, all of them, shoved under carpets and rugs which struggle to be let out. So there was hardly any need for me to find the culprit or ask someone to point fingers.