The Fairness of Tanning*

(c) Flickr user MartinaYach

There was a time when all you’d use Fair&Lovely for was to get married. But Fair&Lovely grew with time; now you want to be fair not only to get married but also to get back at a boy who’s been ignoring you all this while (obviously because you were dark) and to get a job (especially if you are interested in becoming a model or an air hostess). And now Fair&Lovely has discovered that boys might want to be fair too in order to win girls, so they have been blessed with Fair&Handsome. No more stealthy use of your sister’s or bhabhi’s fairness cream! Quite often termed Indian’s ‘colonial mentality’, the obsession with being fair (read beautiful) afflicts us to this day.


On the other hand, ‘tanned’ skin seems to be all the rage in Europe and America. I have seen tourists baking themselves in the scorching heat of India to get that ‘tan’. I believe part of that is aimed at going back to the home country and enticing reactions such as “Oh, you look so tanned! Where have you been?” which obviously helps to brag about the ‘adventurous’ holiday in the dark Orient.
I was aware that the ‘bronze look’ is catching up in the West but it was only after I came to London that I discovered how huge the tanning industry actually is! The risk of cancer doesn’t seem to dampen spirits either. Is it the ‘imperialist fantasy’ of the sexually charged and promiscuous Oriental Other that fuels the tanning industry?

Some would argue that both the industries (fairness and tanning) are exact equivalents — both capable of imparting Otherness; both products of consumerism targeting women as their biggest potential market; both make women believe that they have to change their skin colour to be more attractive and ‘appealing’. But leaving aside the health risks involved in the process of changing one’s skin colour, somehow the idea of Westerners trying to make themselves dark does not seem as offensive as the constant bombarding of adverts for fairness creams on Indian television. I have never been able to accept that both industries have the same implications.

After all, I have never come across a European or American girl who lacks self-confidence and believes she is ugly because she is ‘too fair’. The opposite is not true. There are plenty of Indian girls, who for the sole reason that they are dark (maybe only slightly darker than the ‘average’ colour), have receded into a shell cursing their luck that they were born so. And it is obvious that this debilitation of confidence is caused by the way parents or the society looks at the girl child. A particularly dark Indian girl child is looked upon with pity and a kind of remorse from the moment she lies in her cot because of the long string of societal connotations (and negative implications) attached with the girl’s dark colour. A white girl baby, on the other hand, is not ‘judged’ or considered to be ‘doomed’ for her skin colour per se. Undeniably, as the white girl grows up she may feel the need to be more sexually appealing by changing her skin colour, but that does not make her consider her natural skin colour to be a curse.

The difference is the two situations is the difference between ‘colonial mentality’ and ‘imperialist fantasy’. While tanning, as an imperialist fantasy, does not make white skin colour any inferior, fairness as a colonial mentality, strongly establishes the degraded status of black/brown skin colour. The point being that tanning, as a fashion statement in the West, is not institutionally racist like the fairness propaganda in India is.

But perhaps there is a ray of hope here — the adaptation of tanning or dark skin colour as a fashion statement in the West has been inevitably picking up in the Indian film industry as well, with actors boasting their tanned or bronzed look. However, we are still a long way from rescuing skin colour from the chains of racism and consumerism.

*Originally published on Ultra Violet