Growing up in South Asia, I would regularly find a particular beauty product on my grandmother’s dresser. It came in glossy pink packaging and was called “Fair & Lovely”. My grandmother must have been 50 when I first watched her carefully extracting the softly-perfumed white cream from the pink tube and gently massaging it onto her face. It was one of the earliest beauty products on the market that was meant to enhance fairness of complexion.
My grandmother is almost 70 now, and I still find mutilated tubes of the same “Fair & Lovely” in different compartments of her handbag. The colour of the packaging has changed from glossy pink to a sophisticated, and fitting, white, while my grandmother’s application of the product has evolved from just a face cream to a sun-block, lip balm, foot cream and all-purpose moisturiser. What has not changed, however, is the premise of the product’s marketing campaign, which still states that fairness of skin equates to loveliness of personality. Yet even after 20 years of Fair & Lovely usage, my grandmother’s face seems to have turned three shades darker.
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