Skin whitening in India, A dangerous beauty trend

Cinerpharma
4 min readDec 26, 2022

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India is a vast country with a large rural population and health services managed at the state level. As such, painting a complete, up-to-date picture of the misuse of steroid creams is challenging.

In recent months, people are able to buy four types of topical steroid creams over the counter in 16 pharmacies across the subcontinent: in the northern city of Delhi, Kolkata in the east, Ahmedabad to the west and Hyderabad in southern India.

According to doctors and users of steroid creams, the products are also readily available at grocery stores.

When asked what he thought about the continued over-the-counter availability of topical steroids, Dr Abir Saraswat, a dermatologist with 20 years of experience, says he believes India’s powerful pharmaceutical lobby is to blame, citing threats to strike and shut up shop. “Surely, no government wants to countenance that,” he says, adding that unless there is deep reform and regulation, there is no way to stop people from flouting the rules.

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In India, colorism is rampant. Darker-skinned Indians, especially women, face discrimination at work, at school — even in love. Some arranged marriage websites let families filter out prospective brides by skin tone.

So it may be no wonder that about half of all skin care products in India, according to the World Health Organization, are lighteners designed to “brighten” or “lift” — essentially to whiten — a user’s skin color. WHO estimates that such products amount to about a $500 million industry in India alone. Until recently, some of them even came with shade cards — like paint swatches — so that users could track the lightening of their skin.

Some products claim to “lighten” the skin using multivitamins such as vitamin B3, and many users have said they’re happy with the results. Other products may contain mercury or bleach, which WHO cautions can damage skin cells. Other skin-lightening treatments, including intravenous and pill formulas, have been linked to liver and kidney damage.

The most popular brand of skin lightener is Fair & Lovely, made by the consumer goods giant Unilever. Generations of Indians have grown up with grocery store shelves lined with Fair & Lovely creams and face washes. They’ve been sold in India since 1975 with a marketing campaign of TV commercials and billboards that equate pale, fair skin with beauty and success.

Those are stereotypes that many find deeply unfair. And as the Black Lives Matter movement spreads across the world, it has prompted a reckoning about skin color in India and a brazen revolt against one of its most popular cosmetics like sesderma yellow peel.

Feeling insecure

Being slightly browner than the average Indian, by her own assessment, has left Hiran feeling insecure all her life.

“Even the smallest of things, like not wanting to wear brighter colors or just random people coming to you and saying, ‘Oh, maybe you should apply something on your face,’ “ Hiran recalls. “There is not a single Bollywood actress who could represent my skin tone.”

Chandana Hiran, 22, started a petition for a name change for Fair & Lovely skin-lightening cream. She once used it but stopped a few years ago: “I’m not supposed to feel insecure about my own skin.”

Instead, Bollywood actresses star in TV commercials for skin-lightening creams.

The Indian beauty queen-turned-actress Priyanka Chopra — who starred in the U.S. TV hit Quantico — is one of the most famous. In 2008, she appeared in a series of promotional videos for a product called White Beauty. She played a forlorn-looking single woman who, in the first episode, watched a slightly lighter-skinned woman strut past with a handsome man on her arm. In later episodes, after she used the skin-lightening cream, the man fell in love with her instead.

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