A bevy of beauties meaning5/19/2023 Aimed at instilling confidence in all women and now men of every age, it works towards spreading the message that all skin tones are beautiful. An organisation called Women of Worth (WOW) has recently launched a petition appealing for this latest stint of offensive adverts to be taken off their television screens, initiated as part of its Dark is Beautiful campaign. Thankfully, it seems that people have had just about enough. The latest addition to a string of Fair and Handsome adverts starring Bollywood megastar Shar Rukh Khan is currently under fire for sending the same message to young men and boys – that you’ll only be successful if you’re fair-skinned. If this is the measure of someone’s potential and earning power then it’s fair to say (or unfair as the case may be) that my chocolate coloured behind is in deep trouble.Īnd it’s not just women who are being targeted in this way. I still remember the look on her deluded mother’s face as she gave her poor despairing, dark-skinned daughter the bottle - the key to success in her eyes. I also remember visiting Sri Lanka a few years ago and seeing another similar advertisement where a woman was finally able to achieve her dream of becoming a cricket commentator only once she’d turned a few shades lighter. Not only that, but it starred top Bollywood actors Priyanka Chopra, Ali Khan and Neha Dhupia. Only once she’d used a lightening cream, of course. Pond’s and Hindustan Unilever sparked outrage in 2008 when they released a soap-opera inspired series of fairness cream adverts where viewers were forced to wait with baited breath to see if a young woman’s true love took her back. In my motherland of Sri Lanka, adverts promoting fairness as the beauty ideal are a far too familiar sight on the local and Indian television channels with a bevy of beauty brands clambering left, right and centre to secure a place on the lucrative ‘lighter is lovelier’ bandwagon. The skin whitening market is big business there, a multi-million pound industry that is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Asia. Needless to say if such an advert existed here, the media storm that would follow would make sure that it would be swiftly removed from our screens without hesitation (if it even reached that far in the first place). Imagine if you were home one night watching TV and during the break, you stumbled across an advert where a man broke up with a woman because of the colour of her skin.
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