DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) – The world’s largest cosmetic companies have been selling a fairy tale that often goes something like this: if your husband loses interest in you, if his colleagues fire him at work, if your talents are ignored, whiten your skin to change your love life, boost your career and command center.
No company has been more successful in distributing this message in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East than Unilever’s Fair & Lovely brand, which sells millions of tubes of skin-lightening cream annually for as little as $ 2 a piece in India.
The 45-year-old brand earns Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever more than $ 500 million in annual revenue in India alone, according to Jefferies financial analysts.
After decades of widespread advertising promoting the power of lighter skin, a new brand is hitting the shelves globally.. But a new commercialization of the world’s biggest beauty brands is unlikely to reverse the deep-seated biases around “colorism,” the idea that light skin is better than dark skin.
Unilever said it is removing words like “fair,” “white,” and “light” from its marketing and packaging, explaining the decision as a move toward “a more inclusive vision of beauty.” Unilever’s Indian subsidiary, Hindustan Unilever Limited, said the Fair & Lovely brand will be known as “Glow & Lovely”.
French cosmetic giant L’Oreal it did the same, saying it would also remove similar wording from its products. Johnson & Johnson said it will stop selling Neutrogena’s skin fairness and whitening lines altogether.
The makeover is happening in the wake of massive protests against racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, a black man pinned to the ground by a white police officer in the United States.
It is the latest in a series of changes. as companies reconsider their policies amid Black Lives Matter protests, which have spread across the world and rekindled conversations about the breed.
Activists around the world have tried to counter Unilever’s aggressive marketing of Fair & Lovely, with the brand’s ads criticized by women’s groups from Egypt to Malaysia.
Kavitha Emmanuel founded the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign in India over a decade ago to counter perceptions that lighter skin is more beautiful than naturally darker skin. She said multinational companies like Unilever did not initiate skin tone bias, but have taken advantage of it.
“Supporting such a belief for 45 years is definitely quite damaging,” Emmanuel said, adding that it has eroded the self-esteem of many young women across India.
For women raised on these fixed beauty standards, the market is flooded with products and services that can lighten pigmentation from skin damage and lighten skin.
At the Skin and Body International beauty clinic in South Africa, the owner, Tabby Kara, said she sees many people asking if one or two more shades can be turned on.
“It is a general demand in Africa,” he said. “People want to be a little bit more just simply because society expects or is more interested in a person’s justice.”
Historically, throughout North Africa and Asia, dark skin has been associated with poor workers who work in the sun, unlike in Western cultures, where tan skin is often a sign of time for leisure and beauty.
India’s cultural fixation on lighter skin is embedded in daily marriage announcements, which often note the skin tone of brides and grooms as “fair” or “wheat” along with their height, age, and education.
The ancient Hindu caste system has helped uphold some of the prejudice, with dark-skinned people often seen as “untouchable” and relegated to the dirtiest jobs, such as cleaning sewage.
The power of whiter and fairer skin in many countries was reinforced by European dominance, and later by Bollywood and Hollywood movie stars who have been featured in skin lightening ads.
In Japan, pale translucent skin has been coveted since at least the 11th century. So-called “bihaku” products, based on the Japanese characters for “beauty” and “white,” are still popular today with major brands.
Tokyo-based high-end skin care brand Shiseido says that none of its “bihaku” products contain ingredients that whiten skin, but reduce melanin that can lead to blemishes. The company says it has no plans to change its product names, including the “White Lucent” line, simply because other global companies have done so.
In South Korea, the words “whitening” or “mibaek” have been used in approximately 1,200 types of cosmetic products since 2001, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.
Last year, in South Korea, “mibaek” products worth $ 283 million were manufactured, the ministry said.
South Korean beauty company Amore Pacific said it uses the word “brighten” for exports to the United States to respect cultural diversity. However, nationally, they cannot replace words like “mibaek” in creams sold in South Korea due to laws that require the use of specific terms to describe the function of products to lighten skin.
Proctor & Gamble, based in the United States, which sells the Olay brands “Natural White” and “White Radiance,” declined to comment when asked if it had plans to change the brand globally.
Emmanuel said he appreciates the decisions of Unilever and L’Oreal, but wants to know if their entire narrative around skin lightening will evolve.
“We are very excited that it is happening, but we have not yet seen what is really going to change,” he said.
Unilever said in its announcement that it acknowledges that “the use of the words ‘fair’, ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggests a singular ideal of beauty that we do not believe is correct.” Instead, the statement referred to products that offer “skin brightness, uniform tone, clarity, and radiance.”
Alex Malouf, a Dubai-based marketing executive who previously worked at Proctor & Gamble, said the companies had been messing with different audiences around the world, but are now paying attention to the social changes occurring in the United States and Europe, where shareholders are mainly based.
L’Oreal, for example, tweeted last month that it “stands in solidarity with the black community and against any kind of injustice.” Its products in the United States include the Dark & Lovely brand, aimed at black women.
However, outside of the US, the company was marketing its “White Perfect” line for a “fair and perfect complexion.”
“But you can’t do that in the digital age because I can see what you are doing in the United States,” said Malouf. “I can see what you do here”
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Associated Press writers Emily Schmall in New Delhi, Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo, and Hyung-Jin Kim and Kim Tong-Hyung in Seoul, South Korea contributed to this report.
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Follow Aya Batrawy on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ayaelb
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