Skin lightening ads now under new rules in India

In this photo taken Feb. 15, 2011, a woman applies skin lightening cream to her legs as she sits on a curb in Kingston, Jamaica. People around the world often try to alter their skin color, using tanning salons or dyes to darken it or other chemicals to lighten it. (AP/Caterina Werner)

India’s advertising regulator laid out new guidelines this week for the promotion of controversial skin lightening products.

Sales of skin lightening products represent a multi-billion dollar industry in India, where society is influenced by the caste system and colonial legacies, both of which privilege pale skin. In many of the commercials that fuel skin lightening product sales, advertisers equate social success and beauty with fairer skin.

But now, the Advertising Standards Council of India is moving to change how lightening beauty products are marketed.

“SCI’s new guidelines will go a long way in ensuring that advertisements of products in this category do not depict people with dark skin as somehow inferior to those who are fairer,” a press release from the self-regulatory body for India’s advertising industry said.

Ads for women’s skin lightening products such as Fair & Lovely Winter Fairness Cream from Unilever, Olay Natural White Cream from Proctor and Gamble, and POND’s White Beauty Facial Foam are widespread in India.

And skin lightening ads aren’t only directed at women. This ad for Emami’s Fair and Handsome cream stars popular actor Shah Rukh Khan.

According to the council’s new guidelines, ads should not show any discrimination based on skin colour, associate skin tones with social class, or promote sexism based on shade of skin.

“Specifically, advertising should not directly or implicitly show people with darker skin, in a way which is widely seen as, unattractive, unhappy, depressed or concerned,” the advertising council statement said.

The statement also said ads should not show people with darker skin as “unsuccessful in any aspect of life particularly in relation to being attractive to the opposite sex, matrimony, job placement, promotions and other prospects.”

The Advertising Standards Council of India is in charge of dealing with viewer complaints and says that it also monitors over 80 per cent of print and TV ads released each month.