Time to embrace that brown, dark can be beautiful

Like many other outrageous acts of our day, this one came to the fore via the social media. And it was a slight to South Asia’s many dark-skinned women, including models, whose actual skin colour could have been presented instead. South Asians, imagining themselves brown, idolise fair skin and think of themselves as more beautiful than Africans. Most have attached some lineage to connect them to the conquering Arabs — any link to something better than simply being South Asian, brown or dark brown or black. It is time that South Asia’s women and girls started their own campaign, a boycott of products and companies that use only light-skinned models for advertising their products.