India and its UN-FAIR Beauty Standards | Documentary

these are all the complexion products I own there's six of them and not because I love collecting foundations and concealers but because complexion products need to match the color of your skin and be a few shades darker than your skin in the case of a contour sheet so it takes a mixing and matching before you can find the right color anyone who's tried to buy makeup in India will know that finding the perfect match for your skin is a fair person's game the beauty industry either likes to pretend as a dark-skinned doesn't exist or worse knows that it exists but wants to send the message that there's no room for dark skin in the beauty world because dark simply isn't beautiful [Music] the term colorism was first coined in 1982 by Pulitzer prize-winning feminist author Alice Walker and she defined it as a prejudicial of preferential treatment of same race people based solely on their color and color ISM in India has been around for ages it is believed that the audience came to India from Europe and Central Asia and were naturally fairer than the native people who will largely darker they went on to rule them and the cycle of white supremacy began it's not difficult to draw a parallel with the British rule centuries later when yet again the fair-skinned English enslaved the darker skinned Indians setting Eurocentric beauty ideals for the country indian mythology is no exception in the ramayana the ahran hero rama is depicted as fair and the Dravidian Ragnar is depicted as darker in the epic Mahabharata Lord Krishna is darkhero of non-aryan native people interestingly Indians prefer depicting the skin tone of lord krishna as blue in the place of black animals even gods cannot escape the discrimination in our country y'all know Lord Krishna Krishna means dark he's described in Allahabad as nila mega Shama which means as dark as the rain fiddled cloud then why the hell do they show him everybody sky blue in color the how colorblind do you have to be to confuse the color of the coke with the color of the sky and apparently Indian never caught over this bias look around and you'll see the signs if you have dark skin the world is bent on trying to make you at least two shades lighter and the beauty industry is the biggest offender Foundation's Tatyana Terrace is a junior beauty editor who has worked with magazines like Elle and feminine in the past you a dog's leash you check it out and you do what I said it will go like super fat and then it's really skin colors are not very close to each other and then super down so someone is usually present having the option to select just one foundation we have to kind of mix two every month and drugstore brands are the worst offenders foundations that are affordable rarely have options for darker skin tones Maybelline fit me foundation was a worldwide revolution in this area they launched forty shades in the international market but something changed when they launched in India the range only had 17 shades photography audience is built to one cleitus name so probably that's why he has lots of shades in India is because he is not going to be able to sell that to a wider audience but having an inclusive range isn't enough the message you present to your customers counts to estee lauder learnt that lesson the hard way this foundation in particular hasn't her because she is which is mental it was very super I really love seeing doors open in a campaign they have four modules which we shall Akane so that they were not from the same family just very slightly means compromise and not just that when people compared how the models looked in the campaign photos with how they looked in real life you could tell that their skin tones had been altered that something about the discussion and although we are incorporating various syndromes and we're giving to be forward in terms of skin colors are we actually bring back to practice but this isn't just the beauty industries problem the bias is all around us and girls are constantly labelled reducing them to nothing more than the color of their skin Chiara tarragon with Boudicca put a say like pure affair yoga aka Joe Collier katanas errotica a group Cali Cali black and white TV Blackie kala pani Blackie Cali maker and CRO black and Cali and all that was very common name calling I think it starts off from the home front this is our puta Mary Rajan who has been an assistant professor of psychology for the past three years when parents themselves start to compare the child with cousin so every tips name-calling starts from there I was six I think and there was this other younger kid who might have been four and she was the sister of my classmate and so my classmate said because I Baloo but she wouldn't say hi and then she kept saying hi beau de nada Tico and then the kid was like knave about Cal yeah so I was taken aback because she was only sold you know so where would a four-year-old get this get this idea when I was a kid there was this boy I like I really liked him a lot and he would he would call me means I like this person and this person doesn't like me back because of my skin color so I mean I'm probably not good enough to be liked by anyone you're white you're black you're fair these are not from your words that you used to describe something okay you might describe objects and animate things but if it comes to people you're objectifying them you no longer consider them to be human beings and there's one industry that's particularly good at taking the humanity out of appearances advertising is a shared by cha-cha which a gue reason very easy good happen or the thirsty patient healthy [Music] Vangelis t JC healthy and fair baby massage oil from newborn babies to Crone women to even men nobody is spared from being targeted by brands selling fairness products they use words like bright glowing and radiant but in the end everything adds up to fairness we are stocked an animal a purohit a dermatologist with over 12 years of experience in her field if these creams really do what they claim this brings their skins like that but it is not true every given skin type actually there are total six type or six skin types I wanted to say Indian skin thing starts from four five six so we can't change the basic color of your skin the skin color is little with my jeans when I was in school I used to go to shops every month to buy soaps that make you fairer like fair and lovely forever the name itself fair and lovely so when you're fair then only you are lovely if you look at the census 735 million people alone use fair or no whitening skin treatment rate skin whitening treatments right so I think cosmetology or you know these people it's 50% patients I see those who come for the skin lightening treatments these products which contain a lot of ammonia mercury whole chemicals even parable they are not at all safe for the skin majority of the skin products which are available in the market parlors and even local retailers they sell they all the schemes they have someone like my guides an exact person pain with fume amount of topical steroid going in there and all these steroids are very harmful to the scheme advertising convinces the masses to use fairness products that might not even work but there's an even bigger industry at work in India subliminally teaching us what beauty looks like India's film industries have probably done more damage to our perception of skin color then everything else combined and you don't have to take my word for it New Indian Express entertainment reporter Gopinath rajendran agrees I strongly believe there's a bias when it comes to skin color representation in the Indian film industry this bias manifests itself in different forms such as the characterization of a role the lyrics of a song or either the dialogues for example here in Tamil cinema the female actors are often referred to everything white and there you should be compared with a white flower or probably the moon or even milk at times [Music] from whatever I've seen here in the tamil film industry they usually don't normalize dark-skinned if they do it's predominantly for comic relief where they make fun of the skin tone and when you think about what's happening now in 2019 what's happening is even for roles such as the ones from rural stories where the characters are expected to begin to hawk we are using models from Mumbai and everywhere else who are obviously fair-skinned and we go to an extent of even darkening the skin colors this double standard and skin color representation when it comes to male actors and female actors here in South Heroes can be dark skinned there was actually seen as a plus point here I suppose because most of the male actors from the south are dark skinned when compared to the counterparts who are mostly [Music] the other four nine get a my anger it affects women more than men because the men are supposed to be tall dark and handsome so there are many dark guys who flaunt saying you know I am tall dark and handsome a woman cannot say that I am dark and beautiful because the society will laugh at you as I'm in a manageable age so as we look into the profiles of different boys in the bureau's there are some profiles that I've seen that first reference looking for affair slim good-looking working and so on it's the first word over there Fair itself you know I feel okay just because I'm not fair there itself I'm disqualified women wage a daily war against the constant scrutiny on their appearances and it's far from easy raising a generation of women who shun these ideals altogether just ask Michelle job professional photographer and mother of two daughters damage that media and society caused by projecting that a woman's worth is all dependent on her appearance is damaging on so many many many levels like so many levels that we can't even comprehend how it is impacting every small detail of our life I always had this inferiority complex which stopped me from doing a lot of things from you know participating in a lot of competitions or whatever it is programs and I was always the one who is to take the backseat it's okay I cannot do it even if I can I will be respected out there so I felt a lot of inferiority complex because of my color when I was younger so I used to always I used to not like taking pictures with girls who are even fairer to me or to stand beside them one my second daughter was born she wasn't as fair as my older child so when people started coming home they look at my younger one and then they look at my older one and they will say oh she's nice but she's different from the older one right so they don't tell it on your face but you kind of know what's going on in their mind so that's when I realized oh my gosh is this something that my daughters have to deal with when they grow up there was a point in life when I was completely broken down like it so happened that one day I came back home and crying when I went to the washroom because I remembered all those people making fun of me about my skin tone so I thought that you know I should become much fairer I should look more prettier because appearance has been glorified to such a great extent like there are girls who believe that's everything and if they feel that they are short of the appearance that the scale that the media and society has defined they are obviously going to go into a depression of some sort and they are going to miss focus on all that they are capable of the potential they have the talents they have the capabilities they have they're going to lose out completely on all the amazing things that we are packed with thoughts emotions actions are not like when a child was born it's an empty slate the mind of the soil is like an empty slate so everything that the person learns is from the environment and from the people I read a book on parenting and they had mentioned something called the theory of first mention so beat any subject of belief whatever the child hears for the very first time becomes its fundamental belief system that's when I realized before the society messes up with my child's brain and my child's definition of self-worth I have a huge responsibility to instill values to instill self-esteem and to lay a foundation parents schools colleges everyone should be sensitive to the way summer looks it's obvious you know fact that we forget that the way we look is not the person's responsibility it is a genetic compilation so I think that acceptance the sensitization of being okay with who you are accepting your flaws is something that should be there everywhere [Music] you

Channel: Anuja Premika

Views: 2,038,245

Keywords: India, Fairness, Beauty, Fairness Creams, Advertising, Films, Bollywood, Kollywood, Dark Skin, Darkness, Dark is Beautiful, Beauty Standards, Body Image Issues, Documentary, Film, Media, Body Positivity, Skin Colour Discrimination

Id: k47Hj994xN4

Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 06 2019