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A shop for popular Thai beauty brand Namu Life, which sells a range of snail serum whitening products, in Bangkok. Photo: AFP

Skin whitening creams are busy rebranding, but long-held social prejudices in Asia, Africa and the Middle East remain

  • With Black Lives Matter gaining traction, cosmetic companies are scrambling to rebrand skin-lightening products
  • However, removing words like ‘fair’ and ‘light’ is unlikely to alter the deep-seated prejudice around skin tone
Beauty

The world’s biggest cosmetics companies have been selling a fairy tale that often goes something like this: if your husband’s lost interest in you, if your colleagues dismiss you at work, if your talents are ignored, whiten your skin to turn your love life around, boost your career and command centre stage.

No company has had greater success peddling this message across Asia, Africa and the Middle East than Unilever, maker of the Fair & Lovely brand, which sells millions of tubes of skin lightening cream annually for as little as US$2 a piece in India.

The 45-year-old brand earns the Anglo-Dutch conglomerate Unilever more than US$500 million in yearly revenue in India alone, according to Jefferies financial analysts.

Following decades of pervasive advertising promoting the power of lighter skin, a rebranding is hitting shelves globally. But it’s unlikely that fresh marketing by the world’s biggest brands in beauty will reverse deeply rooted prejudices around “colourism”, the idea that fair skin is better than dark skin.
Beauty products near a shelf selling collagen whitening products, at a beauty store in Bangkok. Photo: AFP

Unilever said it is removing words like “fair”, “white” and “light” from its marketing and packaging, explaining the decision as a move towards “a more inclusive vision of beauty.” Unilever’s Indian subsidiary Hindustan Unilever said the Fair & Lovely brand will instead be known as “Glow & Lovely”.

French cosmetics giant L’Oreal followed suit, saying it too would remove similar wording from its products. Johnson & Johnson said it would stop selling Neutrogena’s fairness and skin-whitening lines altogether.

Asia reacts to Johnson & Johnson skin-whitening creams’ withdrawal

The makeover is happening in the wake of mass protests against racial injustice following the death of African-American George Floyd at the hands of police in the American city of Minneapolis. It’s the latest in a series of changes as companies rethink their policies amid Black Lives Matter protests, which have spread around the world.

Activists around the world have long sought to counter Unilever’s aggressive marketing of Fair & Lovely, with the brand’s advertisements criticised by women’s groups from Egypt to Malaysia.

Kavitha Emmanuel founded the “Dark is Beautiful” campaign in India more than a decade ago to counter perceptions that lighter skin is more beautiful. She said multinational companies like Unilever did not initiate skin tone bias, but have capitalised on it.

 

“Endorsing such a belief for 45 years is definitely quite damaging,” Emmanuel said, adding that it has eroded the self-worth of many young women across India.

For women raised on these fixed standards of beauty, the market is awash in products and services that can brighten pigmentation from skin damage and outright lighten skin.
A specialised light treatment is applied to enhance product absorption before the application of a skin lightening product at a demonstration in Lenasia, Johannesburg. Photo: AP

At the Skin and Body International beauty clinic in South Africa, owner Tabby Kara said she sees a lot of people inquiring about going one or two shades lighter.

“It’s a general demand in Africa,” she said. “People do want to be a bit fairer simply because society is more interested in the fairness of a person.”

Historically, throughout North Africa and Asia, darker skin has been associated with poor labourers who work in the sun – unlike in Western cultures, where tanned skin is often a sign of time for leisure and beauty.

Unilever “Fair and Lovely” skin-lightening creams on the counter of a shop in New Delhi. Photo: AFP

India’s cultural fixation with lighter skin is embedded in matrimonial ads, which frequently note the skin tone of brides and grooms as “fair” or “wheatish” as well as their height, age and education.

The Hindu caste system has helped uphold some of the bias, with darker-skinned people often seen as “untouchables” and relegated to the dirtiest jobs, such as removing sewage.

The power of whiter, fairer skin in many countries was further reinforced by European rule, and later by Hollywood and Bollywood film stars who’ve 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,” remain popular today.

A poster promoting skin whitening beauty products in Bangkok. Photo: AFP
The high-end Tokyo-based skin care brand Shiseido says none of its bihaku products contain ingredients that bleach skin, but they do 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 about 1,200 cosmetics products since 2001, according to the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety.

About US$283 million worth of mibaek products were manufactured last year in South Korea, the ministry has said.

Amore Pacific’s Luminous Effect Brightening Ampoule. The company says the names of its products for export respect cultural diversity.

South Korean beauty company Amore Pacific said it uses the word “brightening” for exports to the US to respect cultural diversity. Domestically, however, they cannot replace words like mibaek on creams sold in South Korea because of laws requiring the use of specific terms to describe the function of skin lightening products.

The US-based Procter & Gamble, which sells Olay brands “Natural White” and “White Radiance”, declined to comment when asked whether it had plans to rebrand globally.

Emmanuel said she welcomes the decisions by Unilever and L’Oreal, but wants to know whether they will evolve their entire narrative around skin lightening.

“We’re really excited it’s happening, but we’re yet to see what is really going to change,” she said.

Unilever said in its announcement that it recognises “the use of the words ‘fair’, ‘white’ and ‘light’ suggest a singular ideal of beauty that we don’t think is right.” Instead, the statement referred to products that deliver “glow, even tone, skin clarity and radiance.”

Alex Malouf, a Dubai-based marketing executive who was formerly at Procter & Gamble, said companies had been playing to different audiences around the world, but are now paying attention to the societal changes happening in the US and Europe, where shareholders are primarily based.

L’Oreal, for example, tweeted last month it “stands in solidarity with the black community and against injustice of any kind.” Its products in the US include the Dark & Lovely brand, aimed at black women.

Outside the US, however, the company was marketing its “White Perfect” line for a “fair, flawless complexion”.

“But you can’t do that in the digital age because I can see what you guys are doing in the US,” Malouf said. “I can see what you do over here.”

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: brands rethink lightening in face of protests
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