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By Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

“Wanted: Fair, beautiful girl for ….”, or “Fair, well qualified girl seeks…” This is how a majority of matrimonial adverts in India read. As Americans are obsessive about being a certain size, so Indians are obsessive about being a certain skin color.

The words fair and lovely are almost synonyms and there you have India’s most popular ‘beauty’ product, the world’s largest selling sun screen called Fair & Lovely. This cuts across social, economic and even educational strata. Models and actresses are rarely dark or dusky skinned and those that are tell you how they are routinely made up to look way fairer than they are actually.

While in the West a tanned look is equivalent to a healthy look, that is certainly not so in India. In the cities it is a common sight to see young women on their mopeds wearing long gloves, their entire heads including their faces swaddled in a voluminous scarf. While this is a great way to protect your skin from the elements and pollution, the motive behind this is simply that the young women do not want their skin to darken in the sun.

Nancy told me about her visit to the Philippines, when she headed for the beach to get a nice tan and other people with her who were Filipinos huddled in the shade appalled at the idea. That is how it would be in India as well.

I remember that as children my brother and I who were considered ‘fair’ used to loll in the fierce Indian sun hoping to get tanned mainly because we wanted to be different and attracted a fair amount of disapproval from people around. Lolling in the mid summer Indian sun, I will tell you for free, is fraught with peril. My brother and I only ended up with some ferocious sun burn and peeling painful skin for some days thereafter. So there is ample reason to wear sun block here in India, only not for the reasons that most people do.

This is the billboard of a fairly commonly seen advert. In this picture see how the ‘before’ picture of the model is dark and also unhappy. The after picture is fair and lovely and happy too! Advertisement for these products is incredibly regressive to say the least and even angry making. The before is invariably sad, unsuccessful perhaps lonely and most certainly dark skinned, the after will miraculously be happy, successful, vibrant, popular, and most certainly fair skinned!

I think we in India need to learn to celebrate all the colors and hues of human skin that there are, celebrate each one’s uniqueness and beauty!