India's unfair obsession with lighter skin

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortc ... -fair-skin

The Dark is Beautiful campaign hopes to halt India's huge appetite for skin whitening products, and has a new champion in actor Nandita Das.

Why on earth would they want to do that? Indian women are beautiful in large part because of their exotic, caramel skin, raven hair and those bottomless dark eyes. Woof!

Wouldn't white people look "exotic" to an Indian person ?

China, Korea, and other Asian countries (as well as many parts of Africa) seem to share the idea that to have light skin is to be more attractive than to have dark skin. This may have (likely) descended from the fact that people who spend their lives laboring outdoors over farmland, roads and ditches eventually develop darker skin than those who spend their lives laboring indoors over artworks, handicrafts and governmental services.

In many places, dark-skinned manual laborers are looked down upon as ignorant, dirty, uncouth and generally unpleasant to be around; whereas light-skinned people who work with their heads and hands are looked up to as knowledgeable, clean, well-mannered and generally pleasant to be around.

I think that most women would be attracted to a man who looks like George Clooney than to a man who looks like he's never spent a day indoors in his life.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Also, premise of your question doesn't make sense! Indians themselves are providing the market for these skin-lightening products, and Indians don't look "exotic" to other Indians, so that would hardly deter them.

You both make good points: I like the way that those female "Bollywood Dancers" look (and move!), and it is also obvious that this is a situation that is generated and supported by India's own culture.

I think that it's the same as with women everywhere -- once a certain "Ideal" of beauty is culturally established, every girl within that culture strives to conform before she's even fully developed -- an obsession with perfection, as it were.

Just look at the way that "Heroin Chic" took over the fashion industry, and how many girls go fully bulimic to conform to it.

"Body Dysmorphia", I think it's called.

[quote="starkid"]Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
/quote]

That's just childish, obnoxious and rude, and more than a bit racist.

In India 'caramel' IS light skinned.

Many people ( the lower caste in the north, and all castes in the south) range to chocolate colored (often as dark as subsaharan Africans).

So I'm sure that caramel is the ideal that they are going for. The upper castes of the North are supposidly descended from the Aryan invaders of four thousand years ago. The darker folks are the original subcontinent people they subjugated apparently.

Is this sarcasm? If not, this is an ironic misunderstanding because I ewwwwwed your post because what you posted was at least bordering on racist by definition of the word "exotic." Your exotic comment = they're-beautiful-because-they-look-different-than-whatever-I-consider-to-be-default-looks. I was responding to the mindset of some set of looks being default and judging other groups of people's looks in relation to that.

Are you from up North?

Depending on the mood, phase of the moon, and how you acted, you could be treated like crap cause you're a Yankee. Color doesn't have much to do with it. Lol....

The obsession with light skin in India has everything to do with the ancient invasion of fair haired and skinned Aryans who had ridden off the eastern steppes. Their ancient hymns are filled with the slaughter of the dark skinned people who they regarded as hardly human. And this carries on to today, where the upper caste people have retained a lighter color, while dark skin is associated with poverty, lack of intelligence, and racial inferiority.
Geez, how many American racists know they have something in common with the Brahmans of India?