Sunday, 2 December 2018

Meri Khoobsurti ka Raaz: Women and Indian Beauty Advertisements



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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