Joining the likes of Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, French cosmetics giant L’Oréal Friday said it has decided to drop words 'white', 'fair', 'light', from all its skin products amid the backlash faced by brands globally for racial overtones of their products.
"The L’Oréal Group acknowledges the legitimate concerns about the terms used to describe skin even-ing products, and has therefore decided to remove the words white/whitening, fair/fairness, light/lightening from all its skin even-ing products," the beauty company said in a statement to the press on Friday.
The move will be extended to all markets globally, said the maker of Gariner shampoo and Maybelline make-up, but it did not mention when it plans to drop these words.
India is the largest market for fairness products. While Hindustan Unilever and Procter & Gamble, Emami and Loreal which dominate the near Rs. 3,500 crore fairness cream market in India have long been criticised for encouraging the negative stereotype against darker-skinned people, these companies had been silent on this front until the Black Lives Matter movement hit this year.
This was despite the advertising regulator Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) issuing guidelines in 2014 that prohibited ads from depicting dark-skinned people as disadvantaged.
Bollywood celebrities, too, have endorsed the skin whitening creams including Shah Rukh Khan, Dia Mirza, Preity Zinta, Katrina Kaif, Priyanka Chopra, Deepika Padukone, Sonam Kapoor, Disha Patani and Yami Gautam in recent years.
It, however, remains to be seen if a mere change in name will be enough to discourage the sale of such products and the strong biases they invoke.
An assessment by ‘Research and Markets’ titled "India Fairness Cream & Bleach Market Overview, 2018-2023" suggests that women's fairness cream category will achieve market revenues of more than Rs. 5,000 crore by year 2023.