Abhay Deol slams fairness creams ads,takes on fellow actors... - Page 4

I agree with him and I am totally against the use of such products...but why has Abhay ignored his friend Hrithik? He too used to endorse a fairness face wash.

i like abhay. he is brilliant in oye lucky lucky oye but he is definitely grasping for relevancy with this .

They should do ads for skin lightening and bleaching treatment.

Originally posted by: NimbuMirchi

Like Kangu for rejecting this ads. Also, she said.. she won't do item numbers and the reason was pretty impressive. Appreciate her firmness over this!

It's really appalling to see some being so ignorant about the presence of stigma in Indian society towards dark skin, specially girls. Where I come from, when a girl is born people don't ask whether she is healthy or not, they ask whether she was born fair or dark. If she is born dark that is equal to a curse for the parents and the child. The whole life she and the parents has to answer why she is so dark, who will marry them.

Then the parents have to think about gathering dowry. As the girl has dark skin tone the groom will demand much higher dowry as he will be doing a big favor of marrying her. The parents have to sell their souls to get their daughter married. Then during matchmaking, she has to undergo countless rejection for being dark, some even would say to her face how dark she is. After slew of rejection, she will find a groom who would take pity(and huge sum of dowry). An educated, kind, intelligent girl will get married to a guy double her age, SSC passed and who hardly makes his ends meet.

But god forbid if she finds love and gets married to a good looking, well settled guy. Then she has to live her whole life listening to taunts of butt hurt relatives and friends like "how can she get a husband like that", "she doesn't deserve him", "he will leave her soon". The in-laws too will not spare her, constantly taunting her , asking for dowry. Leading her to depression and eventually death by suicide.

Kudos to Abhay for calling out his peers/seniors from BW. But unless the ppl of India stop buying these products, this trend isn't going to go away. Then skin lightening products will be replaced with skin brightening products.

Just wanted to add that the appeal of lighter skin isn't necessarily racist (some people genuinely prefer lighter skin, some prefer color) and that the British may have had nothing to do with it. Many different cultures glorified light skin because "poor" people laboring in the sun were dark. Rich people could afford to be fair. White people tan now because dark skin no longer means "laborer" to them but in the past women wore huge sun hats and carried umbrellas to stay as fair as possible. At one point elite women (and men) even powdered their skin to look ghostly pale -yuck. Anyway, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder and unfortunately women are always harshly judged for the way we look. If it isn't skin color, it's weight or height, or nose size, or lip size, or breast size, etc. None of it is fair.

Originally posted by: namkeen_halwa

Neither white is superior to black nor black is superior to white..we have got our skin colour based on our habitat

Modern Human Diversity - Skin Color

Why do people from different parts of the world have different colored skin? Why do people from the tropics generally have darker skin color that those who live in colder climates? Variations in human skin color are adaptive traits that correlate closely with geography and the sun's ultraviolet (UV) radiation.

As early humans moved into hot, open environments in search of food and water, one big challenge was keeping cool. The adaptation that was favored involved an increase in the number of sweat glands on the skin while at the same time reducing the amount of body hair. With less hair, perspiration could evaporate more easily and cool the body more efficiently. But this less-hairy skin was a problem because it was exposed to a very strong sun, especially in lands near the equator. Since strong sun exposure damages the body, the solution was to evolve skin that was permanently dark so as to protect against the sun's more damaging rays.

Melanin, the skin's brown pigment, is a natural sunscreen that protects tropical peoples from the many harmful effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays. UV rays can, for example, strip away folic acid, a nutrient essential to the development of healthy fetuses. Yet when a certain amount of UV rays penetrates the skin, it helps the human body use vitamin D to absorb the calcium necessary for strong bones. This delicate balancing act explains why the peoples that migrated to colder geographic zones with less sunlight developed lighter skin color. As people moved to areas farther from the equator with lower UV levels, natural selection favored lighter skin which allowed UV rays to penetrate and produce essential vitamin D. The darker skin of peoples who lived closer to the equator was important in preventing folate deficiency. Measures of skin reflectance, a way to quantify skin color by measuring the amount of light it reflects, in people around the world support this idea. While UV rays can cause skin cancer, because skin cancer usually affects people after they have had children, it likely had little effect on the evolution of skin color because evolution favors changes that improve reproductive success.

There is also a third factor which affects skin color: coastal peoples who eat diets rich in seafood enjoy this alternate source of vitamin D. That means that some Arctic peoples, such as native peoples of Alaska and Canada, can afford to remain dark-skinned even in low UV areas. In the summer they get high levels of UV rays reflected from the surface of snow and ice, and their dark skin protects them from this reflected light.