Fair and anxious: on mimicry and skin-lightening in India

Abstract

Skin-lightening or ‘fairness’ creams – with their troubling colonial overtones – are big business in India, an over $200 million industry that comprises the largest segment of the country's skin cream market. Although corporations like Unilever have been widely criticized for profiting on colorism, they continue to produce advertisements that equate light skin with beauty, success, and empowerment. Through an analysis of the fairness motif in advertising and popular media, I first show how skin-lightening creams are positioned as alchemic agents of self-transformation. Secondly, as the use of skin lighteners continues to grow in the global South, I ask: how are we to understand this aspiration for lightness? Rather than viewing this kind of cultural mimicry as a form of false consciousness, I argue that it represents an anxious love for the ‘other’ that is conditioned by power relations.