Every time there is a break between the overs, during IPL or probably any show on TV, the first thing to hit the Ad scene are the fairness experts !!!
There’s the Fair & Lovely to top it all with its cream and face-wash.
There’s also the Vaseline Healthy White, which assures you a white skin all-over your body, not only the face.
The OLAY assures many more things among fairness…
Ponds White Beauty, Gold Radiance – there are many from one single brand…
Let me come to the point.
While we are obsessed with getting fairer, the other part of the World, is hell bent on getting tanned. They sit hours together on a hot sunny beach or under UV lights for that color which people try harder to get rid off in India and other Asian countries.
But, here are a new set of people, who are beyond all these, where their melanin is not under their control or under the control of the creams and lotions they use. Those are the people who have VITILIGO !!! Ok, in lay man terms, its the leukoderma.
And these people are counselled to forget about the skin color or overcome the changing colors with calmness. The more stressed a person is about the patches, the more severe it can become.
Being a person with this syndrome, I absolutely hate the skin color obsession among people and the way many brands are making money out of it. There are instances when people don’t have control over the skin color. And these people literally hate the fairer color patches on their skin. Its not always that fairness is loved.
Not everyone is made perfect by God. Let us accept how we are or how other people are made and respect them for the heart they have.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all ???? Oh dear, lets forget this fairy tale and get on with reality !!!
UmaS Reflections 
I agree!! I just ranted about it on my post as well!!
What you say is right – the ads are getting worse day by day and the discrimination against skin colour is getting worse!
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ooh! me first as well! 😀
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You echo my thoughts Uma and made me dig up this old post of mine – (where you were first to coment almost 2 yrs back 😛 ) – http://endowedwithmetis.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/thoughful-thursday-trinklets-4/
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Uma, you know I totally agree with you on this! Skin colour is pure rubbish, but our mentality of admiring ‘fair skin’ and assuming fairness=beauty will hardly change. It is pathetic, to say the least.
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Colors and discrimination! Media should stop advertising these stupid stuff…they only create a kind of inferiority sense among not-so-pale-souls….People should stop becoming someone else, and accept the beauty god has given them.
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well said ! while it’s not a big deal for any fair skinned gal to say that beauty is skin-deep, it takes lotsa courage for someone on the other side of the colour palette to not fall for the cheap gimmicks or succumb to inferiority complex; Uma a honest post – bravo
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Super post… I just finished ranting about this a few days ago…am so sick and tired of the whole fairness thing in India..and I am a mother to a ‘dark’ child..that too a girl child..so you can well imagine the comments coming in all directions!!!
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We don’t have a television (meaning cable connection – we have a TV that is connected to the DVD player alone) for precisely this reason – to eliminate materialistic, shallow misconceptions from our lives. So when the kid occasionally watches an ad like this in her grandparent’s house, she is flabbergasted.
Crazy, we human beings are !
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The world is going crazy. As if we have any dearth of obsessions as is! I totally agree with you about the futility of it all.
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People prefer white skin so these fair n lovely etc… sell like hot cakes uma.I have faced it myself many times and even varu faces this discrimantion,we indians are obssessed with the white colour.
The dark colour guy wants a fair wife so that he gets fair kids etc…..Nothing has changed much only the ads have increased for these fairness products….
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The question is , what if one is the most fairest , still someone doesnot findthem fair WHAT THEN..
did we all not read that beautiful lies in the eyes of the beholder , what is fair for me might not be fair for someone else ..
It is jsut a rat race.. else I would have been the fairest for sure 🙂
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Totally with you on this! I dunno why can people not grow up beyond these things which shud really not matter!
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Ridiculous! Totally hate it. I think I mentioned in one of your posts before too or somewhere else that when one of my older cousins was ‘seeing’ [or is it being seen?] proposals, a few of my aunts and uncles were not allowing me to come out bcoz the guy might see me and say No to her? Whyyy – just bcozz of the skin colour even though I was just in my 11th-12th then! I am so glad she is not married to any of such colour-loving, not ‘wife-lving’ people now hmmpf!
And u r so rt Ums – problems galore. I recently met people affected by leprosy and can see how much guts it takes to face the same and live in the society. How then can we be brooding over such small things like colour and size and what not 😦
Hugsss Ums!
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Oh dear, lets forget this fairy tale and get on with reality !!!
I SO agree! 😡
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I couldn’t agree more with you, Uma! I’ve seen this mentality among so many of the educated, supposedly aware lot, that I feel disillusioned. Surely people with degrees, and exposure should know better? Surely they should understand that they should not pass on their own insecurities to their children? But no, some will take them to multiple doctors in the vain hope that their color can be ‘improved’!!!!
Wonderful, Wonderful post, Uma! Read it the day you posted, but could not comment from that browser, so kept forgetting to comment 😦
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Btw, how are you finding the ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’? I loved it! If you like books of this sort check out this one – Apprenticed to a Himalayan Master by Sri M. It is fascinating!
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Hv taken a break from reading that book, Smitha…contemplating whether to go with the Meluhas 🙂
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You are so very right, Uma! Don’t know when this madness of fixation for fairness will end!!
When will we look at the beautiful inner you and not the outer you!
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I agree. Skin whitening, skin darkening, all so pointless.
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