When will our obsession with fair skin end?

I was late into catching the second season of the now much-talked about OTT show, Made in Heaven. How else would you explain the scores of matrimonial ads even today that begin with that same old line, “Looking for a fair, slim, ….” The fairness cream market in India is estimated to be worth nearly Rs 5,000 crore. The need to be politically correct may have changed our vocabulary and replaced “fairness” with “glow” or “complexion improvement”, but the crux of the issue remains the same: your skin tone defines your beauty. Urvashi Butalia, author and manager of Kali for Women, the country’s first feminist publishing house, was quoted in an article titled India's disturbing obsession with fair skin in the website World Crunch, saying that “whiteness is linked to power” because those who reigned over India, from the Aryans to the British, were light-skinned. The Dark is Beautiful campaign—started in 2009 by an India-based non-profit called Women of Worth—goes on to add that British historians observed since upper castes were not involved in tedious labour and weren’t as exposed to the sun as the lower castes, they used to stay indoors and thus possessed lighter brown skin.