beyondbrics

A dark skin complexion remains one of Indian society’s most visible taboos.

Indians are becoming more western in their consumer habits, buying anything from jeans to mobile phones, but on one point they remain resolutely traditional – the preference for fair over dark skin.

The skin-lightening industry is expanding. No longer the preserve of middle-income women who indulge in daily healthcare regimes, whitening is both widening its product range and target demographic, moving from faces to armpits, and from middle-class women to men and the rural poor respectively.

Earlier this year, German giants Nivea launched the first spray-on whitening deodorant for female underarms for a specifically Indian market, whilst the likes of French company Garnier, Germany’s Beiersdorf, and India’s Emami are targeting the male grooming market with their own ranges of men-only whitening products.

Meanwhile, in rural India, sales of skin whitening creams have grown by 100 per cent.

“The key to success is in the bottom of the pyramid” according to Aditya Agarwal, director of the Emami Group, whose ‘Fair and Handsome’ cream is endorsed by India’s most famous actor, Shah Rukh Khan.

“As we know, in the era of commodity explosion, the rural market has emerged as a lucrative target,” he told the Hindustan Times.

The skin whitening industry as a whole is worth an estimated $466m and is expanding at a rate of 25 per cent a year according to the research firm Nielsen – growth that is both evidence of the rising purchasing power of socially mobile Indians and the availability of cheap skin-whitening products to poorer parts of the population.

What is an age-old prejudice that links darker skin with lower castes, menial labour and a perception of being less beautiful by default, is now a multi-million dollar industry.

“The smart approach of having smaller sachets that are priced right and media campaigns in rural areas have contributed to wide-spread use of whitening products in rural India” according to Lydia Durairaj from organisation Women of Worth,  which launched a Dark is Beautiful campaign in 2009.

“But even before, the market was inundated with whitening products. Other local bleaching or coloring agents were being used throughout the country. New products just highlight these practices as glamorous, trendy, and appealing” Durairaj told beyondbrics.

The ubiquity of skin-whitening is partly based on the fact that it can be achieved without recourse to drastic or expensive cosmetic procedures.  You don’t even have to be a user of the somewhat non-subtly named market leader, Unilever’s ‘Fair & Lovely’, to take measures to lighten your skin. Most moisturisers and lotions aimed at women contain lightening elements and in contrast to bleaching, boast time-honoured herbal ingredients.

Periodic rows about the practice have often erupted, and usually around celebrity involvement, but they seem to have little effect on consumers.  Fashion magazine Vogue India attempted to take a stand against the “appearance of light-skinned Bollywood stars and models” in an issue called Dawn of the Dusk that celebrated the “skin the world covets”.

But is it right to expect Indians to rail against the practice, especially when the tanning industry in developed markets, notably the west, is so lucrative? One could argue that the desire for lighter skin in Asia is just the flip side of the popularity for bronzed and tanned complexions amongst Caucasians and Europeans, which may not have such ancient associations, but similary link darker complexions with health and attractiveness.

For the companies that produce them at least, skin-whitening products provide for a social need however questionable this need is. When it comes to Snow White’s age old call of ‘ mirror, mirror on the wall’, it seems that for Indians, the lightest are still the fairest of them all.

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