Vaseline launches skin-whitening Facebook tool for India

[Liberal_in_LA]

Vaseline launches skin-whitening Facebook tool for India

SKINCARE group Vaseline introduced a skin-lightening application for Facebook in India enabling users to make their skin whiter in their profile pictures.

The download is designed to promote Vaseline's range of skin-lightening creams for men, a huge and fast-growing market driven by fashion and a cultural preference for fairer skin.

The widget promises to "Transform Your Face On Facebook With Vaseline Men" in a campaign fronted by Bollywood actor Shahid Kapur, who is depicted with his face divided into dark and fair halves.



"We started campaign advertising (for the application) from the second week of June and the response has been pretty phenomenal," Pankaj Parihar from global advertising firm Omnicom, which designed the campaign, said.

In 2005, Indian cosmetics giant Emani launched the first skin-whitening cream for men, called "Fair and Handsome," 27 years after the first cream for women.

Since then a half dozen foreign brands piled into the market for men, including Garnier, L'Oreal and Nivea, which promote the seemingly magical lightening qualities of their products in ubiquitous advertising.

In 2009, a poll of nearly 12,000 people by online dating site Shaadi.com, revealed that skin tone was considered the most important criteria when choosing a partner in three northern Indian states.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/breaking-news/vaseline-launches-skin-whitening-facebook-tool-for-india/story-e6frf7jx-1225891373014

[ZombieHorde]

1. Advertising which declares one skin tone as preferable over another skin tone is

probably very unethical.

The ad seems deceptive as well, the fairer half of his face is in the light while the normal half of his face is in shadow.

[Hosnon]

3. What about showing what I would look like tan? nt.

[JuniperLea]

6. That was my second thought....

All the years I tried to get a tan on this pasty white Irish/Welsh skin. I understand we have Coco Chanel to thank for that... it was considered low class to be tanned, because only those who did physical labor in the sun had a tan. Then Coco came back from the French Riviera and proclaimed that the wealthy elite have time to lounge in the sun. We can thank her for the rise in skin cancer, and the sale of tanning lotions.

[Hosnon]

8. I definitely own my paleness.

And I don't want skin cancer. But I recognize that tan is culturally more attractive and wouldn't fault Vaseline for trying to make a buck off of that.

[ZombieHorde]

7. Advertisements claiming tan skin is better than non-tan skin are probably unethical. nt

[Hosnon]

9. +1 for consistency. nt.

[JuniperLea]

14. Much like the advertising of cigarettes...

Or booze.

[JuniperLea]

2. That is disgusting! Despicable!

WTF? Can't people just be proud of who they are? This smacks of corporate manipulation of the masses!

All you brown skin people surely MUST want to be white... white is sooooo much better... your life will improve, you will be far more happy... :puke:

Is it true blonds have more fun?

He can't be a man cuz he doesn't smoke, the same cigarettes as me...


I hate humans... really... fucking nuts.

[Liberal_in_LA]

4. This skin lightening stuff has been going on for several decades, now they are targetting men

[JuniperLea]

5. I'm quite sure men with lighter skin tones have larger penises...

And a much higher level of testosterone... and drive bigger trucks...

[SoCalDem]

12. My cousin used to use lemon juice..

didn't change her olive skin tones, but she smelled lemony fresh :)

[JuniperLea]

15. Clean lemony fresh victory is mine!

[dmallind]

13. Except this is reacting to a demand decades if not older well known

It's not creating it. Victorian writers mention preference for "wheatish" or pale complexions amongst Indians when seeking marriage partners long before Vaseline advertised they could help with it

[JuniperLea]

16. Still, you'd think we'd learn from past mistakes...

The Chinese wrapped the feet of young maidens to the point of crippling them for the sake of so-called beauty. I see the problem as two-fold. One, making people feel that au natural, the way Goddess made them, is bad. And two, making a profit from that is pretty shady... I do actually blame those who make money off the manipulation of others. Cigarettes, booze, bad banking practices... all bad.

[jberryhill]

20. Any cosmetic fad can be taken too far

Taking this out of the context of Indian cosmetic preferences into how it plays in our culture is jarring, but there is no end to teeth whiteners, tanning products, blush, and a whole vanity table spread of things that make this part or that part some other color or shade.

People have always applied substances to their bodies for cosmetic purposes, and trends in different cultures come and go.

[Kat45]

10. Interesting how white people spend so much time trying to tan,

the darker the better and more attractive, yet people with naturally darker skin, whether Indian or African American, will spend money on products designed to make them lighter skinned. Nobody is happy with what they have; nobody is happy with who they are. Quite sad, actually.

(Edited to add: I don't know if African Americans still go this route, but they used to.)

[tammywammy]

23. I've always thought that was interesting as well

I'm whiter than white, a red head with pale skin. I'm very comfortable with what I was born with, and since I don't tan I know my skin will look much better than my peers that do. :)

[FarCenter]

11. There are a few hundred million southeast Asians that are just about the right shade of brown

[City of Mills]

17. Why not just photoshop your pictures then?

Everything about this is dumb.

[ohheckyeah]

18. I already have an app for that.

It's called PhotoShop.

[thereismore]

19. WTF. nt

[Cleita]

21. The brown people want to get whiter and the white

people want to get tanner. Go figure.

[formercia]

26. Let's fuck each other until we're all cafe au lait.

Sounds like a good plan to me.

[phusion]

28. +1000 n/t

[Cleita]

29. Sounds like a plan. My family seems to already have

started.

:rofl:

[Chulanowa]

22. That's nothing

Oil of Olay had a skin-whitening cream in India, and their advertisements were... hideous. It was a whole series of TV commercials. A gorgeous lady is trying to win the heart of a man she's attracted to. The problem (According to the ad) is that she's too damn dark. He brushes right by her efforts to get his attention in order to hook up with another very attractive but substantially lighter-toned woman. It's a series following the darker lady's travails as she tries to get this guy's attention.

The message it sends is just deeply, deeply disturbing.

[jberryhill]

24. TTIUWOP

Think about how this once-popular advertising icon would play today:

[Lorien]

25. Ah, humanity. We pasty white people coat ourselves in self tanners

or give ourselves cancer in tanning booths. The Indians use skin lighteners and silly Apps. We'll never learn.

[RagAss]

27. We Hate ourselves don't we?

[paulk]

30. the times I've been in Thailand, I was always curious

why often construction workers and/or people who worked outdoors all day in the blazing sun would wear ski masks and long sleeved shirts... when I asked around the answer was that they didn't want their skin to get any darker than it already was - because getting a tan - getting darker skinned - was a class issue, in that manual laborers/lower classes had to work outdoors in that awful heat... I imagine the same holds true in parts of India.

It's the same reason that "redneck" is a derogatory term here.

[Hekate]

31. This is a cultural preference in India that goes back a couple of thousand years--nothing at all new

It probably has something to do with the way the darker skinned folk who originally settled in India were driven out of power by invaders.

It figures into the caste system (just one piece of it, obviously) -- which was India's very own invention, not an import from Europe or America. Missionaries and others from the West were pretty uniformly appalled by the caste system from the get-go, regardless of their opinions on color.

It figures into home-grown Indian concepts of beauty.

In other words, Vaseline is not doing something harmful to the Indians. The company is simply filling a marketing niche already well-occupied by cosmetic products for women.

[Heywood J]

32. The Bulworth solution comes to mind

"Everybody just got to keep fucking everybody else till we're all the same color."