South Asians Are Dispelling Age-Old Beauty Standards with #UnfairAndLovely
A relatively newer hashtag has been on the rise on the Internet. #UnfairAndLovely has been making rounds on Instagram, becoming increasingly prominent, and it involves South Asians, mostly, calling out, and devouring beauty standards that are blatantly so last-century.
If you’re a South Asian with dark skin-tone, it is fair to assume you, at some point in your life, must’ve been berated for a feature of your being that you have no control over, a feature that, really, doesn’t need to be controlled.
The Indian subcontinent, for one, seemingly has an undying admiration for a lighter skin-tone. It is not wrong to admire lighter skin-tones, but it is excruciatingly unjust, uncalled-for, and inhumane to berate, despise, and ridicule people with darker skin-tones.
Fair & Lovely, a well-known “skin-lightening” cosmetic product in India, which was first introduced to the Indian market in 1975, promotes a harmful misconception that only lighter skin-tone equals beauty and self-confidence. For a product that endorses such “beliefs,” Fair & Lovely has been subjected to a fair amount of controversy (and just general discontentment from the masses), yet not enough to shut it down, or to at least drive it to some form of brand-evolution.
The millennial generation is not going to feed the faulty notion anymore, and the hashtag #UnfairAndLovely evinces that well.
@reclaimthebindi, an Instagram handle geared towards addressing the issue of cultural appropriation, has kicked off its “Reclaim the Bindi Week,” and this time, they’re also focusing on combatting “colorism/shadism in South Asian communities in collaboration with #unfairandlovely.”
It is time we, as a civilization, do away with beauty standards, in general, because they instill a catastrophic belief that only certain “kinds” of beauty are acceptable, because they lead to a toxic differentiation based on mere superficiality, because they go against the very existence of beauty.
Fair isn’t the only lovely.
Tags:
US ON
