Thursday, January 01, 2009

Fair enough?

An advertisement on TV shows a girl trying to get a job, but due to are natural complexion, a brown one, she is rejected for the job. She tries some cream, 10 days.. or 14 days (different companies claim different periods), and viola!! she turns like a beauty contest contestant over a fortnight.. and gets the job.!

Beauty magazines and fairness creams have been promoting and glorifying fair skin ever since i have been watching television. Ponds, Lakme, Revelon, Garnier, Nivea are some of the major players who have been instrumental in marketing these so called "fairness " cream. With advertisements depicting people with fair skins are more successful than the not-so-faired one, the marketing strategies have become more and more inexorable. The worst thing is, a "developing" country like ours, proves a more potent market for such products. And we call the American and Brits as racist.?? What are we then.? Having accepted these ads, having accepted that people with fair skin are superior to the one with not-so-fair, how do we call them racist.? Whats worse is that, after the advent of this new species called "metrosexual men", these creams have now started to target the males too.! Ads showing guys with fair skin being able to woo girls, or get the female attraction has been the chief propaganda.! What happened to the "tall dark handsome" fellow?? what happened to the tanned skin toned girls?

I don't understand but why we have this tendency to believe or trust a fair (the skin tone and not the persons intentions) person more easily than the one with say not-so-fair, or brown or dark complexion?? Is is the word "fair" attached to it? Is it since white is related to pureness and black to dark? Is it, since we were ruled by the whites and the sense of superiority has not yet left us? Or even worse.. that they really are superior? i really wonder...