As usual, ads for fairness creams have come under fire.

The withdrawal comes after protests from several women’s organisations, led by the All India Democratic Women’s Association, that these ads stigmatised dark skin and they should be taken off(Ads cleansed in all fairness – Commercials pulled off television after viewer objections)

I’ve heard many claims that Indians are “racist” because they prefer fair skin over dark. I don’t understand the accusation.

All evaluations of beauty are qualitative. We prefer youthful faces over older ones. We prefer slimmer women to fatter ones. We prefer smoother faces over wrinkled ones and women of medium height over very short women. While many of these criteria are universally held, there are many others that are culture specific. Some cultures prefer round faces while some prefer long ones. Some like round eyes while some like narrow ones, etc.

There is very little an ugly woman can do about any of the things that mark her out as ugly (except perhaps her weight). So I don’t understand why skin-colour preference is singled out as particularly unfair (pardon the pun).

Being beautiful does provide an advantage to women (and to a much lesser extent, men) even where objectively speaking, looks shouldn’t matter. I am sure that prettier women have at least some advantage over others in getting jobs, for example. So it is much more coherent to rail against the idea of idolising beauty itself.
But if you do so, you’d be up against the combined forces of literature, art, culture and biology, to name just a few of your potential opponents . I think that it makes much more sense to make people aware of their biases so that they can correct it, rather than try to eliminate bias.

In any case I don’t see why advertisements should be blamed for “perpetuating stereotypes”