Saturday, March 10, 2012

Only fair is beautiful in India: the Indian obsession with fair skin...

“Just yesterday, a 15-year-old school girl came in in her school uniform, asking for a whitening treatment,” exclaimed Rhitika Shetty*, who owns a chain of five-star salons and spas. In her 10-year long career, this wasn’t the first time she had seen a young girl walk into her salon and inquire about fairness treatments. “But even today, I cringe every time I hear it,” she says. But Shetty admits, that she rarely discourages it. “The demand is huge, and if we don’t cater to it, we will lose out. That’s a risk I’m not willing to take as a business woman” she says.

If the demand for fairness creams and treatments are anything to go by, it’s evident that we Indians have an unhealthy fairness fetish. While men, too, seem to be taking to this fetish, our society obsesses more about a woman’s skin colour than a man’s. As Dr BR Madhukar, senior consultant psychiatrist at St Martha’s Hospital, Bangalore says, “While our society is almost fanatical about fair skin when it comes to women, it is kinder to dark-skinned men.”

Dissecting this fixation, Dr Madhukar says, it is most commonly seen in adolescent girls. “That’s when one begins to get attention from the opposite sex, and therefore, one obsesses over everything to do with appearance. And fairness is a critical aspect for many,” he says. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Why are so many Indians obsessed with fair skin?
  2. Black is the colour I like best...  
  3. I am black, but I wish I were white. Sad...
  4. Facebook application that gives Indian men a lighter skin!!! 
  5. Indian men spend millions on skin-whitening creams...
  6. "Snow white syndrome", India's obsession with fair skin... 
  7. Why are so many black and Asian women desperate to be white?
  8. It's not just your caste, it's also the colour of your skin...

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