Fair is often unfair. Sometimes unwittingly. More likely than not, fair (rather than dark) will get the job, the role... and despite the lesser dowry, even a kinder mother-in-law. Dark on the other hand, lives with taunts, open and implied, of murky biological roots, of not making the eye candy grade, of being just a tad lesser than human. No leading roles, no cover shoots, none of the fringe benefits that automatically attach themselves to fair people.
The Fair is lovely. Or so the beauty industry would have us believe. Working as it does on the insecurities of its target groups to secure its own fortunes; in skin colour, the industry found its gold mine. Decades of raking in the millions through selling dreams of lighter skin and its accompanying benefits to generations of young women blessed with comparatively larger doses of melanin spurred the whiz kids in the R&D sector to spread the net to cash in on men. Dark men. ‘Tall, dark and handsome’ may get the girl in Mills and Boon romances; in real life men had to be fair to win. In some oblique way the fact that they were fair proved they had better brains and thus were more employable, better providers.
In reality, of course, just as all blood is red, regardless of caste or creed or economic status, skin colour has nothing to do with efficiency or ability. Dark skin, on the other hand, comes blessed with benefits, including greater resilience against sun damage and less vulnerability to scarring and pigmentation. And often, even without external aid, dark skin can glow with its own lustre.
Yet, women of all ages who look at themselves in the mirror and find their skin colour short of the ideal tint, will seek to camouflage it with lotions and creams embellished with pink tones. It is as if by doing so, they hope the taunts that have burrowed deep into their consciousness can be made to cease their whispering. The braver ones, on the other hand, hit the other extreme, with minimal or no make-up. Either way, the wounds on the psyche show up.
Through my childhood years, I watched the discrimination at work. It did not help that I was the ‘lucky one’. It still hurt when people looked at us, my sister and me, when we were together, and I watched their smiles grow dimmer as they took in her darker skin tone. It mattered little that she had the perfect features, the large eyes, the rich curling lashes.
They could not, would not look beyond the colour of her skin. It made my mother react too, to try and correct the imbalance. For years, she would try out various creams promising to lighten her younger daughter’s skin, putting my sister through sweaty discomfort in the process. I remember a shoot we were to be a part of in a Films Division documentary, and my sister was made to face the camera after my mother had applied something labelled Whitex on her face. It made her decidedly ghoulish! Luckily, the director insisted that she wash her face and look natural, which when done, also wiped off the scowl from her face and replaced it with a smile.
Perhaps the memory coaxed me to make my statement when I could. Breaking the code that all magazine cover girls had to be fair, or made to look fair, I shot a cover for Femina with the lovely dark-skinned Carol Gracias who was not just beautiful but a great singer too. My cover story was titled ‘Dark is Beautiful’. Belying all prophesies of poor sales, the issue sold out, and the letters bag bulged with stories from women, and men, who had been waiting all these years to exhale.
The message reached out to cheer the dark skinned among my readers; but obviously left the rest of the country unmoved. Now, like with yoga and meditation and the goodness of turmeric, India has imported the thought that discrimination on skin tone is not quite correct. Tokenism rules, as with every movement. And will die out. Changing Fair to Glow changes nothing! Natural and Lovely, with a formulation that nourishes without claims to lightening may be a signal of honest intentions. But which company will take that dare?
saran.sathya@gmail.com
Author & Consulting Editor, Penguin Random House