The latest ad for Fair & Lovely completely threw me off kilter! I have seen their ads in the past.....girls not getting married because of their dark skin, girls getting rejected by prospective grooms until they have started the 6-week F & L regimen, girls being depressed because of their skin, distraught fathers scrambling around trying to find a groom for their ’’ugly’’ daughters......that incensed me no end, but this latest ad takes the cake and the bakery for being the most sexist, most chauvinistic and the most prejudiced of them all.
It shows a little girl playing with Barbie and I assume Ken. The girl looks at her Ken doll and then looks at her dad fondly coz he looks as handsome and fair. And then she looks at Barbie and says ’’My mother’’ and looks in her mother’s direction, who is not quite the beauty...(read) not as fair-skinned! The child gets all wistful because her mother is not all fair and lovely like Barbie!!! The family decides to try F&L so that the mother can be the beauty queen that the child wants her to be! This is the giddy limit!
The previous ads with adults in them were bad enough, but now to perpetuate such unhealthy notions in children, is carrying it too far. How many of us associate beauty with our parents? We love our parents for who they are and not for what they look like. I can never tell you if I thought my father was handsome or my mother beautiful because I dont look at them like that. To me they are my parents and I love them, I cannot objectify them as the Barbie and Ken models that I have played with. And who the hell are these Barbie and Ken.....they are lifeless plastic dolls from the factory for crying out loud.
In a society that is still grappling with grave issues like female infanticide, dowry deaths and illiteracy, these ads that only seem to reinforce more myths that fair-skinned women are the most desirable and that dark skin is a curse, have no place. How many people in the south of any country can boast of being ’’white’’? The climate and weather of a place, your genetic makeup and the pigmentation in your body decides the color of your skin.....how does color make you a better person or change the personality you have??
I believe F & L makes the most profit for Hindustan Lever. It’s understandable. There are a lot of insecure and unsure girls out there who are buying into this propaganda that looking neat and being nice isnt enough, it’s important to have fair skin, not healthy skin. And these totally inappropriate ads continue to reinforce those warped ideas.
I am happy the way I am, completely comfortable in my skin, literally and figuratively! And in the future, if my child says something like that to me, I will give her/him one tight slap on the bottom and say shut up, not run out and buy a fairness cream!