Fairness Meter

The billboards are everywhere. A close-up of a woman’s face with a card against it showing a scale of skin tones from dark to light. Like a litmus test. The sign says “Fairness Meter” and is advertizing a skin lightening product. In South Asia the whiter your skin, the more beautiful you are. So skin lightening products are everywhere. Fair enough (pun intended), in the West, we buy skin darkening products (tan in a bottle) to fulfill our own bizarre beauty ideals (and some still destroy their skin by spending hundreds of hours in tanning booths and on the beach). But the way these skin whitening products are being marketed is blatantly “degrading” (my female Bangladeshi colleague’s word) to dark skinned people, women in particular.

Skin lightening product TV commercial #1: The father of a dark-skinned woman is lamenting the fact that he has no son and therefore no money. The daughter uses the skin lightening product and lands a job as an air hostess. In the last scene of the commercial she is shown taking her parents to a 5 star hotel for coffee.

Skin lightening product TV commercial #2: A dark-skinned stunt man is a nobody until he uses the skin lightening product whereupon the director suddenly “notices” him and gives him the starring role in the film.

Obviously, neither person is purported to get the job based on merit, but on the color of their skin. Unfortunately, this is probably a real reflection of existing discrimination (just as naturally dark-skinned people are in Northern societies). What I find fascinating is that the commercials naturally condone this discrimination. Their solution? Cosmetics as social equity.

The ‘Fairness meter’ is promoted to right the wrongs in society that you have no control over. It is not fair that dark-skinned persons are discriminated against but if they use this product they can control this discrimination. By becoming fairer skinned, they are being given a ‘fair shake’ in society.

There are many ironies in this campaign, but the cruelest is that the products are actually extremely harmful to one’s skin, eventually degrading the elasticity to the point that if one required surgery on the face, it would be impossible to carry it out. So the dark-skinned are being convinced to buy a product that will supposedly give them opportunities in life, but the price they pay (in addition to the product) is destroyed skin.