What’s
age got to do with it?
Mira Rajput’s first television advertisement can easily
top the list of celebrity endorsements gone wrong. Earlier this year, she came
under the scanner and was trolled on social media for promoting an anti-aging
cream. But a lot of female celebrities including Madhuri Dixit and Genelia D’Souza have endorsed
the brand, so what went wrong? (Apart from the fact that the features on their
faces look like CGI in those ads).
Mira Rajput is all of 23 years old.
The ad displays her looking sad in front of
a mirror, lamenting the pregnancy glow that vanished after delivery. But after
taking the “28-day skin transformation challenge”, a happier Mira Rajput says, “My skin felt young and radiant, it was like
being born again.”
Source: Storypick
Then I came across an article
on the Quint titled, ‘Chill, Mira Rajput Is Not Endorsing an Anti-Ageing Cream’
which stated that it is only a face cream. Perplexed, I watched the ad again,
and realised where the gap lied.
This was a case of an anti-aging cream
disguised and rebadged as pro-skin. The vocabulary of “glow”, “transformation”
and being “reborn” used in the ad, now dominates the skin-care industry at
large, unlike in older advertisements where it was directly referred as
“anti-aging” and “signs of aging”. It does the job of sounding pleasantly
body-positive while the apparatus of continuing to age-shame women remains
intact, like old wine in a new bottle. Or rather a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
While it is understandable that the fear of
mortality might scare the wits out of some people, but the never-ending
obsession of removing all signs of having seen too much life still looms large,
not only on women, but most directly at them.
Age-shaming is doubly problematic as it not
only locates a woman’s worth entirely in her appearance, but also rejects the
value of experience in them. This essentially means that one is denying their
wisdom rather than flaunting it. The irony in this situation being, Rajput
ending the advertisement with a feel-good dialogue of- “Being a mom doesn’t mean you stop being yourself, right?” as the
bold white text “#REBORN” flashes on the screen.
Whether it is L’Oreal’s tagline “Because
you’re worth it” or Dove’s “#LetsBreakTheRulesOfBeauty”, This feel-good
terminology extends to a lot of skin-care branding in India today.
Twacha se Meri Umr ka Pata hi Nahi Chalta
Apart from the new plethora of day and
night skin creams and moisturisers, the long-standing Wipro’s Santoor Stay
Young soap has also been a part of the age game.
As per August 2018 Economic Times report,
Santoor has overtaken Lux as India’s No. 2 soap brand. Wipro Consumer Care CEO Anil Chugh said: “Santoor is now the No. 2 brand all-India in
terms of volume, securing a clear lead over the brand behind us. We have
achieved this through distribution reach, the consistent advertising
proposition of younger looking skin, and new variants, which appealed to our target
segment.”He adds that Santoor has always been the leading brand across
urban and rural markets in South and West India.
Having grown up watching its advertisements
in the 90s, 2000s, and 2010s, there is a steady progression in how it depicts
the woman. From just being doll-like in weddings and admired by old ladies, the
Santoor woman now plays basketball,
is a rockstar, artist, and also Saif
Ali Khan’s dance trainer.
But the basic premise of the advertisement, a little girl comes up to the
youthful main lead shouting “Mummy!” while all the other characters echo
“Mummy!?” acting all pleasantly surprised, remains the same, as same as the
orange clothes the Santoor lady sports in all ads to match the brand colour.
Divided by professions, united by a single aspiration to youthfulness it seems.
Time marches on, but removing all signs of
aging on a woman’s face is not ready to stop anytime soon. Whatever happened to
aging gracefully?
How did this belief in the cosmetic
industry start in Modern-day India, where so many people still buy into the
companies’ promises? In the book ‘Nawabs, Nudes, and Noodles’, Ambi Parameswaran who’s an
industry insider since forty years, locates it as follows:-
“The
opening up of the economy in the ‘90s saw the entry of global beauty brands
that set out to redefine beauty. Sensing the opportunity, Pradeep Guha, then
Director at Times Group decided to play up the Femina Miss India contest into a
national celebration of beauty – and brains, if I may add. Not only
participants carefully selected from across the country with several regional
rounds, Times also invested heavily in training them to make an impact on the
global stage. Pradeep hit pay dirt in 1994 when two of his proteges,
Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai, won the two most prestigious beauty crowns, Miss
Universe and Miss World. The double whammy did for the beauty pageant industry
what Kapil Dev’s World Cup victory did for one-day cricket. Young girls wanted
to win beauty contests, beauty parlours started sprouting up across small town
India and in came a slew of global cosmetic brands.” (Parameswaran, 2016)
Show
me your true colours
Continuing with another reference from the
same book, the discussion on Indian beauty advertisements would be incomplete
without referencing the fairness industry, when skin lightening products occupy
61% of dermatological market in India (Jose and Ray, 2018)
“I was at a panel discussion in
Mumbai in April 2015 where several panellists were discussing the role of a
woman in Bollywood. Actress and producer Nandita Das was at her vocal best
explaining how dark skin was a big taboo in mainstream Bollywood movies even in
the 2010s and she pointed out how actresses turn fair as their career
progresses.”(Parameswaran, 2016)
The first actress that comes to my mind is
Kajol. She was darker than most other leading actresses in the 90s and had a
unibrow. But none of that stopped her from becoming one of the most
successful Hindi film actresses of all times.But before-and-after photos
show a drastic change in her skin tone, speculating a number of media reports
on possible fairness bleaching treatments. Her response was that of a vehement
denial.“For 10 years of my life, I was
working all the time under the sun, which is why I got tanned. And now I am not
working in the sun anymore. So I’ve got untanned. It’s not a skin whitening
surgery, it’s a stay at home surgery,” she told entertainment website Pinkvilla.“I’ve already gotten that (success and
stardom). Why would I lighten my skin now?”
Source:
Pinterest
Being the brand ambassador of Olay, she
appeared in the advertisement of Olay Total Effects. In the advertisement, her
dialogue reads that upon using the product, “itne saalo aur life mein itne changes ke baad bhi, meri skin dikhti hai young
aur nikhri.”
The catch here is the word “nikhri”:-
“While fairness creams
advertising was once restricted by Doordarshan into describing gori as nikhri –
the dictionary meaning of nikhri is improved or better, but Hindustan Unilever
has been using it so consistently to promote its fairness cream that today
nikhri almost means fairer to the lay public…” (Parameswaran,
2016)
“Kajol
is 41 and looks half her age,” a film critic wrote in Huffington
Post, ”aside from having given
fairness cream companies further reason to exist.”
In the book ‘The Global Beauty Industry:
Colorism, Racism, and the National Body’, Meeta Jha points to the local
national history of the fair-skin status:-
“Many transnational
feminist scholars (Runkle, 2004; Paramweswaran 2005; Osuri, 2008) have argued
that
Bollywood cinema, television, celebrities, beauty queens, and advertisements
have converged in reinforcingBritish colonial hangovers of an Indian
idealization of lighter-skin complexion referred to as fair-skin status.In the
Indian context, as in many national contexts, skin colour discrimination has a local
history. Specifically in India, it is based on class and caste stratification …
Skin-colour discrimination in the Indian subcontinent predates the arrival of
British colonialism and imperialism and has origins in the Hindu religious
caste system… Lighter skin in India is associated with education, upper-class
status and success, thus conflating
progress with whiteness, modernity, and
westernization.” (Jha, 2015)
In 2014, the fairness obsession reached new
heights when Clean and Dry intimate wash was released, priced at Rs. 100. The
voice-over in the advertisement
states“gupt ang ki twacha ko rakhe clean,
surakshit, aur rangat nikhare.”The advertisement features a young Indian
couple inside their home. The woman seems perturbed at her husband’s seeming
disconnectedess as he reads the paper. The unsatisfied woman then hits the
shower with her Clean and Dry product to please her man. After using the
product, she jumps around frolicking with her husband on the furniture with
renewed lust. Divorce averted?
Similarly, vaginal tightening creams and
breast enhancement capsules etc. all are part of making women younger,
bouncier, and virginial.
Source:
Facebook
Source:
Facebook
With the incoming of products like these in
the Indian market, it has boiled down to eliminate darkness from every nook and
cranny of a woman’s body. The vagina is naturally darker than the rest of the
body and also cleans itself, but such companies easily cash in on the pressure
and anxieties of women. Noted Bollywood director Shekhar Kapoor also said, “Cosmetic companies are trying to turn
India into a nation of Albinos. No dark area on any part of the body. Except
may be our hearts. Got a cream for that?"
Source:
DoodleODrama
The Clean and Dry ad director, Alyque Padamsee,
thinks the media backlash is an overreaction. He wrote: “It
is hard to deny that fairness creams often get social commentators and
activists all worked up. What they should do is take a deep breath and think
again. Lipstick is used to make your lips redder, fairness cream is used to
make you fairer — so what’s the problem? … The only reason I can offer for why
people like fairness, is this: if you have two beautiful girls, one of them
fair and the other dark, you see the fair girl’s features more clearly. This is
because her complexion reflects more light.”
Midas Care, the Creators of Clean and Dry
were also reached out to by media outlets for a response:-
"Clean and Dry is a direct
result of conversations with women between the ages of 16 to 35 years, across
the country. The task was to identify the problems faced by women in their
vaginal area in their daily life. Unfortunately, not many of them knew whom to
talk to about such a personal problem. They did not even take the problem to
their gynecologist, choosing instead to suffer silently. Clean and Dry is among
the first few brands to address these problems of daily hygiene, odour and pH
imbalance...The ad in no way is meant to offend anyone. The fairness bit is
nothing but one of the many offerings of the product.”(Qtd.
in Vice)
When I read this, the only thing that
didn’t add up for me was that this particular group of women aged 16 to 35 told
these marketing consultant teams about their most intimate genital-related
problems, one which they hid from their medical professionals? They must be
really persuasive and empowering, I guess.
The
Cost of Being a Woman
A commercial for Veet hair removal cream
came out in April 2018. There were two identical commercials, one starring Shraddha Kapoor for the
Indian audience, and the other cast
Mahira Khan for Pakistani audiences. Both fair-skinned young women, in pink
body hugging dresses to match the brand colour, stride across the basketball
court wearing heels.
She dribbles the ball and shoots a basket
without breaking so much as of a sweat, as the other players look in awe. A
player’s arm brushes against hers, as the former exclaims “So smooth!”
“Not just smooth, but perfect!” comes her
response and they both high-five.
Apart from the impractical garb that the
leading ladies put on for a basketball game, the
advertisement also portrays an unrealistic as well as unnecessary beauty
standard. The pressure of smooth arms, fairer skin, and thinner legs should be
the last thing sportswomen should have on their minds. When Sana Mir, a
cricketer and the former captain of the Pakistani women's cricket team, came
across the commercial, she raised these very questions.
In a scathing post
on Facebook, the sportsperson wrote addressing "To all young girls out there who aspire to take up sports.”-
“One of the ad campaigns
that has finally pushed me to come forward with my concern is the latest
campaign by a company promoting a hair removal cream.… Are the talent, passion
and skill of a girl not enough for her to play sports?
There are female sports
icons around the world who have made their way to the top because of their
skill, talent and hard work, not because of the colour or texture of their
skin.
Make no mistake: you need
strong arms, not smooth arms, on a sports field.
During my 12 years as a
sportswoman in Pakistan, I have rejected several offers to endorse beauty
products just for this reason: I want young girls with a passion for sports to
know that all they need for a practice session are the will to succeed,
comfortable shoes and clothes, a water bottle and a cap if it’s hot…”
Source: Sana
Mir official Facebook account
Also, believe it or not, hair removal also
has to do with the conversation of aging.
Our society wants to live in a peculiar infantile fantasy where
women’s hair only grows on their head and eyebrows, and everything else is
supposed to look pre-pubescent. It is in fact equivalent to de-sexualising
older women to fit into the mould of a younger girl by using the tool of shame
to undergo various hair removal procedures.
“Take pubic hair which over the past two decades has likely
been discussed more than at any known time in history... Most of the debates
stem from an incontrovertible fact: female pubic hair, once considered a
desirable marker of adolescence... is now a disappearing phenomenon. Its
extinction has been driven variously by the easy availability of porn, the
mainstreaming of lingerie marketing, and a 24/7 culture of celebrity
surveillance. Though waxing defenders are quick to remind us that pubic hair
removal has enjoyed popularity throughout history as far back as the ancient Egyptians
and Greeks, the contemporary world has seen an unmistakable uptick in both the
practice and available services...” (Zeisler, 2016)
As per a 2017 study
done by The Quint, the hair removal industry in India was estimated to be a 21
billion rupees as of 2016, with the sale of depilatories alone reaching 15.1
billion rupees. And the money to this
multi-crore market of femininity is going from your very own pocket. How? Consider an urban middle class woman
visiting a mid to high range parlour. It can charge upto Rs. 1,500 for
chocolate wax of arms and legs. If we compare this to how much men spend per month on their grooming. A
shaving and trimming session can cost around Rs. 150.
Meanwhile, somewhere in a farm in Punjab,
it takes only Rs. 500 to mow an entire field.
Textual References (that are not linked
above):-
·
Parameswaran, Ambi. Nawabs, Nudes, and Noodles: India
through 50 Years of Advertising. Pan Macmillan. 2016
·
Jha, Meeta R. The Global Beauty Industry: Colorism, Racism,
and the National Body. , 2016.
·
Jose and Ray. ‘Toxic content of
certain commercially available fairness creams in Indian market’. Cogent
Medicine, Vol.5, 2018.
·
Zeisler, Andi. We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl
to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement. Hachette UK.
2016
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