vaseline facebook app lightens users skin color

AOLNews | Skincare brand Vaseline has launched a skin-whitening application for Facebook in India, which allows users to lighten their faces in profile photos. The app is designed to promote Vaseline's range of male skin-lightening creams, which -- so the campaign promises -- will unleash "what is hidden under your skin."

The widget is the latest attempt by cosmetics companies to exploit India's "Snow White Syndrome," a commonly held belief that paler is better when it comes to skin color. Avon already markets a lightener called Refined White there; Revlon has one named Absolute White+; and Estee Lauder sells CyberWhite EX (loaded with "Melanin Dissolving Technology"). What's unusual about this latest push is that it's targeted at men. The vast majority of lightening products -- the first of which debuted on the subcontinent almost 30 years ago -- have traditionally been aimed at Indian women.

"More and more, there's an anxiety in the mind of men about having fair skin," sociology professor T. K. Oommen at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi told Agence France-Presse.

The desire for lighter flesh tones is rooted in the country's ancient caste system (the whiter the skin, the higher the class, and the less discrimination that person will face); a mentality likely exacerbated by centuries of colonial rule by pale-skinned Brits and Portuguese. But those old beliefs are now being reinforced by Bollywood movies -- where the light- skinned hero always gets the fair maiden -- and blunt ads for lightening products, which reach an ever-wider audience as the country gets richer and more media aware. The new Vaseline campaign, for example, features handsome Bollywood actor Shahid Kapoor, whose face has been divided into (purportedly less attractive) dusky and pale halves.

This growing shame over skin color has created a big business opportunity for global cosmetics giants. According to research agency AC Nielsen, the Indian market in skin-whitening creams for men and women is now worth over $430 million and is growing at nearly 18 percent a year. And Omnicom, the advertising firm behind the new Vaseline campaign, told AFP that since they unveiled the app in mid-June, "the response has been pretty phenomenal." The product's manufacturer, Unilever Hindustan, has had no comment on the matter.

Many Indians, however, are outraged that their fellow countrymen and women -- the vast majority of whom have dark skin -- are being made to feel like they were born inferior. Bangalore businessman Kunnath Santhosh has set up a Facebook group called "India Against Fairness Creams" to "protest the 'rash' of products in the market offering to whiten the skins of Indians and make us beautiful/handsome." And an editorial in the leading daily newspaper The Hindu last month bemoaned such cultural preferences: "Gloom descends on the family when a girl child is born, and if she is dark, the gloom takes on a deeper hue of woe."