The Complexities of Body Positivity #2: Skin
Skin is multidimensional, just like our view of it.
The most obvious pedestal for skin is fairness. Enough and more has been said about the role fairness creams, the colonial hangover, and the Aryan/Brahminical supremacy play when it comes to propagating it. So, I won’t delve into the “why” of fair skin aspirations and the prestige it warrants. Instead, I am going to focus on how our conversations have changed when it comes to associating beauty with skin.
Skin goals are largely set by two visual industries - skincare/cosmetics and the media. The former pinpoints a limitation and urges you to fix it, the latter ensures the best-fixed ones are displayed in their full glory.
GLOW ME
As we know, several face skincare brands have moved on from the fairness narrative and have replaced it with another marker – glow. And no, I don’t just mean this is true for Glow & Lovely. From a Rs 10 cream stick to a luxurious brand that sells for thousands, brands are talking about Glow and her sisters – Radiance, Shine, and Even-tone. While none of them speaks directly about the aspirations of having fair skin, they still end up demonstrating a standard.
Some do it tastefully – hire a dark-skinned model, don’t try to cover up her dark spots, but make her look happy and healthy.
Some, not so much – hire a fair-skinned model without any spots, dab her with make-up and demonstrate her sun-kissed skin.
Some, and this one’s my favourite, corroborate skin with overall health – the narrative being poor health shows up first on one’s face. While there is some truth to it, it is largely tone-deaf since hormonal acne, flaky textures, freckles and birth spots are natural and often out of the person’s control. A handful of brands encourage showing raw skin such as Anusha Dandekar’s BrownSkin Beauty.
But colour parity and natural limitation embracement is only a part of the skin positivity discussion.
Excellent face skin is also married to age defiance. And oftentimes our “role models” perpetuate this notion of never ageing.
AGE ME NOT
Miss Universe 1994, the smart, intelligent, terrific speaker, and fairly a good judge of right and wrong – Sushmita Sen recently underwent facelift surgery. She is unrecognizable from her usual self. So much so that after recently receiving a National Award, rather than congratulating her on the achievement, people criticized her for her looks. This became a big problem for the ones in favour of her choice. And this is when body positivity gets complex.
While Sushmita, like any person in a democratic land, has the right to choose what she wants to do with her body, she has made her career on her physical appearance. A beauty pageant put her on people’s radar and the world praised her for her gorgeous face. And today, when the woman directed herself to ensure that is retained, the society at large, rejected her.
LOOKING FOR A FAIR WOMAN
In the urban Indian landscape, face skin criticism comes across as rather benign, but in reality, is extremely vicious for one's self-esteem. There is in fact a third industry that is holding the fairness flag mighty high - the Indian arranged marriage industry. On biodata, in match-maker conversations, in newspaper advertisements, a fair man looking for a fair woman is still the norm. Needless to say, under the guise of being forward-thinking the millennial generation is yet to completely evade the game.
But there is a glimmer of hope. Shaadi.com ended up removing this criterion to choose people based on their complexion, last year.
But what do we see when we first see the picture of a person we would spend our lives with? Did/does complexion matter to you?
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ARE MEN SITTING THIS ONE OUT?
There is a running joke in the “beauty girls*” community.
This is mostly true. After the scandalous puberty years, men rarely struggle with horrible skin issues. That doesn’t mean they are completely out of the prejudice game, but surely they are sitting on the bench for now. Bless!
*Beauty girls: Women who invest a lot of time, money, and energy in skincare and have large opinions on the do’s and don't’s around the skin.