The Business of Insecurity: Skin-Lightening Marketing, Beauty Filters, and Matrimonial Colour Preferences in the Construction of Indian Female Identity

Smt. S.B. Gardi, Department of English

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

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Presented by Priya A. Rathod

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Sem 3 | Presentation Season 3 | October 16th, 2026 | Afternoon Session

Paper 205A : Cultural Studies

Academic Details

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Presented by : Priya A. Rathod

Roll No. : 20

Sem. : 3

Batch : 2025-27

E-mail : priyarathod315@gmail.com

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Presentation Details

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Paper Name : Cultural Studies

Paper No. : 205A

Paper Code : 22410

Unit 1 : Cultural Studies and its Four Goals

Topic : The Business of Insecurity: Skin-Lightening Marketing, Beauty

Filters, and Matrimonial Colour Preferences in the Construction of

Indian Female Identity

Submitted To : Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English,

Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

Submitted Date : October 16, 2026.

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Table of contents

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• Research Question and Hypothesis
• Introduction: The Economy of Fairness
• Historical Roots of Colorism in India
• The Business of Skin-Lightening: Manufacturing Desire
• Fair & Handsome: Male Attractiveness and Colorism
• Fair & Lovely: Profit Versus Public Welfare
• Mimicry and Anxious Love for the Other
• Matrimonial Colour Preferences: Colour as Capital
• Experimental Evidence: Skin Bias in Arranged Marriages
• Colorism as Marriage Capital: Cross-Region Brides
• Cinema: Emboldening Skin and Gender Stereotypes
• Global Public Health: The Dark Side of Lightening
• Situated Affectivity: Mind Invasion and Colour Ideology
• Beauty Filters: Digital Intensification of Colorism
• Differentiated Mechanisms: Not a Uniform System
• Hypothesis Justified: The Evidence Converges
• Conclusion and Lessons for Today
• Works Cited

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Research Question

How do the interlocking systems of skin-lightening marketing, digital beauty filters, and matrimonial colour preferences commercially and culturally construct Indian female identity around perpetual insecurity about skin tone, and what does this reveal about the commodification of racialized beauty standards in contemporary India?

This presentation hypothesizes that skin-lightening marketing, matrimonial colour preferences, and emerging beauty-filter technologies do not merely reflect pre-existing colourism in India; they actively produce and intensify a gendered economy of insecurity. Lighter skin is systematically converted into a form of “colour capital” that women must acquire through creams, digital filters, or marital strategies to secure social legitimacy, marriageability, and self-worth. Corporations, matrimonial platforms, and algorithmic filters collaborate in manufacturing desire for lightness while pathologizing darkness, thereby constructing Indian female identity as permanently incomplete and commercially dependent on corrective products and practices. Crucially, these systems do not operate identically, nor do they produce uniform consequences for every woman.

Hypothesis

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Introduction: The Economy of Fairness

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In contemporary India, fairness is not merely an aesthetic preference but a multi-billion-rupee industry that transforms social insecurity into commercial profit. Skin-lightening products, digital beauty filters, and matrimonial advertisements collectively shape female identity around the idea that lighter skin is more desirable. From advertisements promising success through fair skin to matrimonial platforms prioritising complexion, colourism continues to influence social attitudes and personal choices. These practices reinforce the belief that darker skin requires correction. This presentation examines how marketing, digital technology, cinema, and marriage markets reproduce colour-based inequalities. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, public-health research, and cultural theories, it argues that colourism is not simply a colonial legacy but a system continuously reinforced by contemporary consumer culture. Consequently, women may experience reduced self-esteem and unequal opportunities in relationships and marriage. Fairness becomes a form of symbolic capital that can be purchased, digitally created, or socially preferred. Ultimately, this study explores how the economy of fairness shapes Indian female identity and perpetuates deeply rooted social hierarchies.

Historical Roots of Colorism in India

• Skin-lightening creams carry “troubling colonial overtones” yet remain “big business in India, an over $200 million industry” that “comprises the largest segment of the country’s skin cream market” (Nadeem).

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• Colorism operates as “a subtype of racial phenotypicality bias in which skin tone is used as a metric by which to discriminate against those outside or within one’s own racioethnic group” (Utley and Darity).

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• “Light skin operates as a form of symbolic capital, one that is especially critical for women because of the connection between skin tone and attractiveness and desirability” (Glenn).

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• Bollywood “shared Hollywood’s privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency” .

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• The preference for fairness long predates independence yet was systematically intensified by post-1947 commercial cinema and later by liberalization-era advertising that linked lightness to modernity and mobility.

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• While both genders experience colour bias, “women announce their skin complexion more than men make known their desire for light complexioned women” in matrimonial contexts (Utley and Darity).

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The Business of Skin-Lightening: Manufacturing Desire

• The industry positions creams as “alchemic agents of self-transformation” that convert ordinary women into successful, desirable subjects (Nadeem).
• Emami, maker of Fair & Handsome, explicitly states: “A fair complexion has always been associated with success and popularity. Men and women alike desire fairness, it is believed to be the key to a successful life” (Nadeem).
• Advertisements equate light skin with “beauty, success, and empowerment” while corporations “continue to produce advertisements that equate light skin with beauty, success, and empowerment” despite criticism (Nadeem).
• Glenn observes that “the production and marketing of products that offer the prospect of lighter, brighter, whiter skin has become a multi-billion-dollar global industry” integrated into “transnational flows of capital, goods, people, and culture” (Glenn).
• Karnani’s case study of Fair & Lovely demonstrates that the brand is “doing well” commercially yet is “not doing good,” producing “negative implications for public welfare” by reinforcing colour hierarchy (Karnani).
• The market is highly segmented: “large multinationals can draw on local experts to tailor advertising images and messages to appeal to particular audiences” while informal economies also thrive.

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Fair & Handsome: Male Attractiveness and Colorism

• Mukherjee’s multimodal analysis of six Hindi television commercials for Emami Fair and Handsome (2005–2015) shows that “lighter skin tone has become one of defining properties of attractiveness (being ‘handsome’) through the advertising of skin-lightening products” (Mukherjee).

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• These commercials portray “light skin color as the most fundamental quality of being handsome, attractive, cool, and hence, always desirable and successful” (Mukherjee).

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• The study reveals that urban Indian audiences no longer accept the Western phrase “tall, dark, and handsome”; instead, “dark” in popular Indian usage now denotes dark skin tone rather than dark hair (Mukherjee).

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• Mukherjee argues that the commercials are “significant for their categorical distinction in directness as well as for their nature of storytelling that helps facilitate the discourse of colorism itself” (Mukherjee).

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• By targeting men, the industry expands the insecurity market beyond women, demonstrating that colour capital is increasingly demanded of both genders while remaining more intensely policed for women.

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• The overall goal of such advertising is “to bring visibility to this subtle and multilayered problem of colorism in Indian society which is being reinforced by the skin-lightening products for men” (Mukherjee).

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Fair & Lovely: Profit Versus Public Welfare

• Karnani’s critical case study asks whether firms can “do well by doing good.” Fair & Lovely is “a profitable and fast growing brand” yet “is, however, not doing good” (Karnani).

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• The brand’s advertising “links light skin with modernity, social mobility, and youth,” reinforcing the very hierarchy that generates demand for the product (Glenn ).

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• Karnani concludes that the divergence between private profits and public welfare cannot be reconciled through corporate social responsibility alone when the core product itself pathologizes dark skin.

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• Unilever’s earlier Facebook application that digitally whitened profile images further illustrates how the corporation actively participated in the aesthetic normalization of lightness (Nadeem).

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• The persistence of such marketing despite widespread criticism demonstrates that colourism is not merely a cultural residue but a profitable structure that corporations have little incentive to dismantle.

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• Thus the business of insecurity thrives precisely because insecurity is continuously reproduced through the very products that claim to resolve it.

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Mimicry and Anxious Love for the Other

• Nadeem rejects the “false consciousness” explanation of skin-lightening. Instead, he argues that the aspiration for lightness “represents an anxious love for the ‘other’ that is conditioned by power relations” (Nadeem).

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• This anxious mimicry is not simple imitation of colonial standards but a complex affective response to hierarchical power that makes lightness appear as the route to recognition and security.

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• Barkha Dutt’s televised question-“Is wanting to be fair about personal freedom? Or is it about gross racism?”-captures the unresolved tension between agency and structural constraint (Nadeem).

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• The fairness industry therefore sells not only cream but a narrative of transformation that promises to resolve the anxiety it itself intensifies.

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• Mary Douglas’s insight that “the physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains” particular social pressures is central to understanding why skin becomes the site of such intense affective investment (Nadeem).

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• Anxious mimicry thus becomes a technology of the self that is simultaneously intimate and thoroughly commercialized.

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Matrimonial Colour Preferences: Colour as Capital

• Utley and Darity’s analysis of one day’s matrimonial advertisements in the Sunday Times finds that “skin shade is described far more often in advertisements placed by prospective brides or their families than prospective grooms” and that “whenever complexion is mentioned, the possession of lighter skin shades” is claimed (Utley and Darity ).

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• The study of Indian matrimonial websites reveals “an overwhelming bias among males for brides lighter-skinned than themselves” and that “dark-skinned women were almost non-existent in these ‘success stories’”.

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• Males were “more likely than females to state a preference for skin color in their prospective brides, and to use qualitative words like ‘beautiful’ and ‘lovely’ to describe their preferred match”

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• Hunter’s concept of “race capital”—“the way light skin and Anglo bodies operate as a form of capital”—is extended by these studies into colour capital that women must possess or acquire to be marriageable (Utley and Darity).

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• The technological interface of matrimonial websites intensifies the bias: “powerful profile ‘menu’ options and the visual imagery of predominantly light-skinned, ‘successful’ brides illustrated on current websites visually reinforce the invalidation of dark skinned women”.

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• Thus marriage markets convert colour into quantifiable capital that structures life chances long before any cream is applied.

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Experimental Evidence: Skin Bias in Arranged Marriages

• Nagar’s experimental study presented mothers with identical educational and professional profiles of potential spouses, then showed either a light-skinned or dark-skinned photograph of the same highly attractive person (Nagar).

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• Results confirmed that “fair-skinned highly attractive people received higher ratings than dark-skinned highly attractive people” (Nagar).

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• Remarkably, “the color of skin has the potential to even overpower traits such as general competency and physical attractiveness in both men and women” (Nagar).

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• Contrary to expectation, ratings for dark-skinned women were not significantly lower than those for dark-skinned men, suggesting that the bias, while gendered in intensity of expression, operates across both sexes in parental evaluation.

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• The study demonstrates experimentally what matrimonial advertisements reveal statistically: skin tone functions as an independent evaluative criterion that can outweigh education, occupation, and conventional attractiveness.

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• This experimental overpowering of competence by colour is the precise mechanism through which the business of insecurity becomes rational for consumers: darkness is treated as a deficit that products promise to correct.

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Colorism as Marriage Capital: Cross-Region Brides

• Kukreja’s ethnographic research across 57 villages shows that “the hegemonic construct of fairness as ‘capital’ conjoins with both regressive patriarchal gender norms governing marriage and female sexuality and the monetization of social relations, through dowry, to foreclose local marriage options for darker-hued women” (Kukreja).

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• Darker-skinned women from development peripheries are forced to “voluntarily” accept cross-region marriage proposals from North Indian bachelors facing local bride shortages caused by sex-selective abortion (Kukreja).

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• These marriages “condemn cross-region brides to new forms of gender subordination and skin-tone discrimination within the intimacy of their marriages, and in everyday relations with conjugal families, kin, and rural communities” (Kukreja ).

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• “Dark-skin shaming is a strategic ideological weapon employed to extract more labor from them” while also exposing them to “caste-discriminatory exclusions and ethnocentric prejudice”.

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• One bride’s testimony crystallizes the violence: “What crime had I committed by being dark-skinned that I was punished by being married so far away from the family” (Kukreja).

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• Colorism thus expands geographically through marriage migration, producing new forms of gendered violence that intersect with caste, ethnicity, and neoliberal precarity.

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• Sheth, Jones, and Spencer demonstrate that between 1947 and 1991 Bollywood “shared Hollywood’s privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency” (Sheth).

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• The influence of film content was “especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information” (Sheth).

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• It was left to “parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media” (Sheth).

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• The business organization of the industry high informality, lack of state recognition, and dependence on star systems helped lock in visual conventions that equated fairness with desirability and darkness with subordinate or comic roles.

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• Oral histories of producers and actors reveal that casting decisions systematically privileged lighter-skinned actresses for romantic leads, thereby naturalizing the hierarchy that advertising later commercialized.

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• Cinema therefore functioned as a powerful pre-digital beauty filter, training audiences to associate narrative success and romantic fulfilment with lighter skin long before smartphone applications existed.

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Cinema: Emboldening Skin and Gender Stereotypes

Global Public Health: The Dark Side of Lightening

• Pollock and colleagues frame skin lightening as “a global public health issue, one of great concern for both women’s health and racial implications” (Pollock).

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• Despite regulations, “lightening agents continue to dominate the cosmetic industry” across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and the Americas (Pollock ).

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• Complications include irreversible damage from mercury, hydroquinone, and corticosteroids harms that fall disproportionately on women of colour who are already marginalized by the very hierarchies the products reinforce.

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• Media and celebrity culture amplify demand: the same visual economy that privileges light skin in films and advertisements drives consumption of hazardous products.

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• The international collaboration of dermatologists calls for “cultural competency to serve and protect patients of diverse skin types and backgrounds” and for “inclusive concepts of beauty” (Pollock).

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• Public-health evidence thus confirms that the business of insecurity is not merely symbolic; it produces measurable bodily harm while claiming to enhance well-being.

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Situated Affectivity: Mind Invasion and Colour Ideology

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• Bajwa, von Maur, and Stephan apply the paradigm of situated affectivity to show how “environmental structures that perpetuate colorism have a pervasive influence on individuals’ values and their emotional repertoire from a very young age” (Bajwa).

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• Colourist ideologies “occupy the mind of people with the effect of marginalizing those with dark skin color and promoting whiteness as a social capital” through processes of “mind invasion” (Bajwa).

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• Individuals then engage in “user-resource interactions assumed to help regulating their affect, that in turn, result in re-enforcing again colorist and racist ideologies and practices” (Bajwa).

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• The framework reveals that emotion is not merely internal but scaffolded by advertisements, matrimonial norms, family talk, and digital filters that continuously invite affective investment in lightness.

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• By documenting how discriminatory positions invade the mind early and are then re-enacted through consumption, the analysis explains the durability of colourism even among those who consciously reject it.

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• Situated affectivity therefore supplies a philosophical account of how the business of insecurity becomes lived, felt, and reproduced at the level of everyday emotional life.

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Beauty Filters: Digital Intensification of Colorism

• Garg et al.’s empirical investigation of AI beauty filters demonstrates that digital technologies now automate and accelerate the same lightening logic previously performed by creams and cinematic lighting (Garg).

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• Filters that systematically lighten skin, enlarge eyes, and narrow noses function as real-time beauty editors that train users to see their unfiltered faces as deficient.

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• The continuous availability of filters on social-media platforms creates a new affective loop: every selfie becomes an opportunity to experience the gap between “real” and “enhanced,” intensifying appearance-related insecurity.

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• When matrimonial profiles and dating applications also incorporate filtered images, the digital and marital markets reinforce each other, raising the visual standard against which unfiltered bodies are judged.

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• Unlike creams, filters require no purchase of a physical product yet still generate commercial value through platform engagement, advertising, and data extraction-extending the business of insecurity into the attention economy.

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• Thus beauty filters represent the latest technological mutation of colour capital: lightness becomes not only purchasable but algorithmically default.

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Differentiated Mechanisms: Not a Uniform System

• Marketing: Skin-lightening creams sell fairness as a pathway to success and self-improvement. However, economic class influences women's access to these products and their ability to meet socially constructed beauty ideals (Nadeem ).

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• Matrimonial Markets: Skin tone becomes a form of marriage capital, with brides' complexions receiving greater attention than grooms'. Darker-skinned women in disadvantaged regions may face restricted marriage choices and additional discrimination (Utley and Darity).

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• Cinema: Mainstream cinema has historically privileged lighter skin through casting and visual representation. However, regional and parallel cinema have challenged these dominant beauty standards (Sheth).

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• Beauty Filters: Digital filters intensify colourism by encouraging constant comparisons with digitally altered appearances. Their influence varies according to social media use and access to technology.

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• Public Health: Unregulated skin-lightening products containing harmful substances, such as mercury or hydroquinone, can cause serious health risks. These risks vary according to product safety, economic resources, and access to regulation (Pollock).

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• Emotional Impact: Colourist attitudes develop through family expectations, advertisements, social media, and relationship pressures. These different influences create varied experiences of insecurity and discrimination (Bajwa).

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• The Korean Wave has expanded the visibility of Korean skincare, cosmetics, celebrities, and beauty routines among Indian consumers.

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• K-beauty operates as both a consumer trend and a form of transnational cultural influence (Menon).

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• Park’s study critically examines how the K-beauty industry circulates idealized fair-skin imagery and colour hierarchies.

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• The pursuit of “glass skin” should be distinguished from the desire to lighten one’s natural skin tone.

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• Beauty influencers and celebrity images can shape aspirations, consumption habits, and expectations of appearance.

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• Cultural Studies perspective: K-beauty raises questions about globalization, representation, consumerism, and the circulation of dominant beauty ideals.

K-Beauty and the Globalization of Beauty Ideals

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Hypothesis Justified: The Evidence Converges

The hypothesis is supported by evidence across marketing, matrimonial markets, cinema, public health, and digital technology. Corporations associate fairness with success and profit from beauty-related insecurity. Matrimonial practices demonstrate how skin tone influences parental evaluations and partner preferences, often restricting opportunities for darker-skinned women. Cross-region marriages can further intensify gender inequalities and social discrimination. Mainstream cinema has historically privileged lighter skin, although alternative films have challenged these ideals. Public-health concerns reveal the risks of harmful skin-lightening products, while digital beauty filters reinforce colour-based comparisons. Overall, colourism continuously reproduces insecurity through different mechanisms, with consequences varying according to class, caste, region, gender, and access to technology.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Indian female identity is shaped by commercial, cinematic, matrimonial, and digital systems that turn colour-based discrimination into profit. Skin-lightening products present darker skin as a problem, matrimonial markets treat fairness as social capital, and cinema and beauty filters reinforce these ideals. As a result, women face pressure to change their appearance to gain social acceptance and desirability. The business of insecurity continues by creating beauty standards that can never be fully satisfied. Its effects on self-esteem and physical health vary according to class, caste, region, and technological access. Ultimately, challenging colourism requires questioning unfair beauty standards, promoting inclusive representations, and recognising the dignity and beauty of every skin tone.

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Lessons for Today

• Treat beauty filters and fairness ads as active agents of colour hierarchy, not neutral tools. Challenge familial and matrimonial discourse that treats fairness as legitimate preference. Support regulation of hazardous agents and truthful advertising.

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• Amplify parallel cinema, independent media, and digital creators who refuse the light-skin default. Individual refusal of creams is valuable yet insufficient without collective pressure on commercial and algorithmic systems that profit from manufactured insecurity.

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• Cultivate affective environments—family talk, peer culture, education-that scaffold pride in the full spectrum of South Asian skin tones rather than continuous correction toward an unattainable ideal of lightness.

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• Any serious response must address both intimate self-worth and the institutional infrastructures that make lightness a prerequisite for recognition, marriageability, and social legitimacy—while remaining attentive to the differentiated ways these infrastructures operate and the uneven consequences they produce.

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• Bajwa, Marium Javaid, et al. “Colorism in the Indian Subcontinent—insights Through Situated Affectivity.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, vol. 24, no. 5, Mar. 2023, pp. 1231–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-023-09901-6.
• Dhillon-Jamerson, Komal K. “Marketing Marriage and Colorism in India.” Springer eBooks, 2019, pp. 121–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11711-5 8.
• Garg, Aashish, et al. “AI Beauty Filters, and Appearance Self-Esteem: An Empirical Investigation.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour, vol. 25, no. 4, 2026, pp. 1678–1700, https://doi.org/10.1002/cb.70141
• Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “Yearning for Lightness.” Gender & Society, vol. 22, no. 3, Feb. 2008, pp. 281–302. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243208316089.
• Karnani, Aneel G. Doing Well by Doing Good - Case Study: “Fair and Lovely” Whitening Cream. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=958087.
• Kukreja, Reena. “Colorism as Marriage Capital: Cross-Region Marriage Migration in India and Dark-Skinned Migrant Brides.” Gender & Society, vol. 35, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 85–109. https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243220979633.
• Menon, Preetha, et al. “Dichotomous Effects of Korean Drama: Commodification of Soft Power.” Frontiers in Communication, vol. 11, July 2026, https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1735539.

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References

• Mukherjee, Sayantan. “Darker Shades of ‘Fairness’ in India: Male Attractiveness and Colorism in Commercials.” Open Linguistics, vol. 6, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2020-0007.
• Nadeem, Shehzad. “Fair and Anxious: On Mimicry and Skin-lightening in India.” Social Identities, vol. 20, no. 2–3, Feb. 2014, pp. 224–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2014.881282.
• Nagar, Itisha. “The Unfair Selection: A Study on Skin-Color Bias in Arranged Indian Marriages.” SAGE Open, vol. 8, no. 2, Apr. 2018, https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018773149.
• Parameswaran, Radhika, and Kavitha Cardoza. “Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India.” Journalism & Communication Monographs, vol. 11, no. 3, Sept. 2009, pp. 213–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/152263790901100302.
• Pollock, Samara, et al. “The Dark Side of Skin Lightening: An International Collaboration and Review of a Public Health Issue Affecting Dermatology.” International Journal of Women’s Dermatology, vol. 7, no. 2, Sept. 2020, pp. 158–64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijwd.2020.09.006.
• Sheth, Sudev, et al. “Emboldening and Contesting Gender and Skin Color Stereotypes in the Film Industry in India, 1947–1991.” The Business History Review, vol. 95, no. 3, Jan. 2021, pp. 483–515. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=60231
• Utley, T. Jerome, and William Darity. “India’s Color Complex: One Day’s Worth of Matrimonials.” The Review of Black Political Economy, vol. 43, no. 2, Jan. 2016, pp. 129–38. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-016-9233-x.

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References

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Thank you!