Will I get rejected? Rejected?? Why? Rejection is one feeling that supersedes every other feeling when a girl faces the “audience” while the process of match making goes on. Advertisements add to her fears which show that a girl with fair skin can achieve anything.

From getting a good job to getting a groom in the traditional ways, criteria of fair skin rule her senses. Every now and then we see advertisements that show a female getting upset before appearing for an interview or something g of the sort. A mother fears that her daughter will be rejected once again only because she is dark skinned. The prospective groom might not take a second look at her daughter. And then suddenly the cream comes to you flashed by somebody telling you that this cream is the ultimate solution for all the worries. This actually makes the audience believe that fair skin is the only answer to a mother’s worries, the only answer to a young girl’s dreams.

We have actors endorsing these fairness creams pushing their fans into buying these creams. This does give a feeling of inferiority complex among many who are dark skinned. What they don’t realise is that dark skin is equally beautiful and it has its own benefits.

Efforts of actress Kangana Ranaut standing against fairness cream advertisements are appreciable. She has clearly expressed that women should not be subject to discrimination. Creams claiming that they can give whiter skin has been termed as criminal act by the actress. Similarly actress Nandita Das has quoted that she was often heard people referring to her as “poor thing , she is so dark”. She says she is lucky to have parents who never discussed the topic of dark skin in the family else she would have grown up believing that she was not good enough.

When actors like Shah Rukh and Arjun Rampal and some more endorse fairness creams, it feels awful to have such celebrities making the youth believe that dark skin is not acceptable to anyone. They make the crowd believe that dark is ugly which repels the crowd. They seem to be endorsing that dark skin is a curse.

Dark skin is not a curse, we need to believe this fact and stand against the fairness cream advertisements. Charity begins at home…parents need to stop telling their kids that drinking milk will make them fair. Sadly some children suffer from the mentality that their dark skin makes them less loved as compared to the fair sibling. This thought keeps on developing making them aggressive which may even result in jealousy. This also develops into those most fatal feelings of rejection which even force a person to compile other feelings pushing them into suicidal depressions.

Dark skin is beautiful. An awareness campaign was launched in 2009 that challenged the general belief claiming that beauty was determined only by fair skin. It laid stress that we need to shed the idea of fair skin and appreciate the natural skin tone of a person. It is high time that we make our children understand that they should not address anyone as “that black lady” or “that dark man”. We need to make them understand that a person is known by his attitude and not by the colour of skin.

Fairness creams and advertisements need to be banned as they only create negativity in attitudes towards those who are not light skinned. Fairness creams are only an addititon to the feelings of racism which we need to put an end to. The world has better things to look into; colour of skin does not change that ‘better’ side of world. It never did and it never will.