Bollywood warmly welcomes fairness cream ban proposal

Bollywood has had an obsession with fairness creams since its inception. It has also strengthened the entire country’s obsession with these kinds of products.

However, with government crackdowns well underway, the attention towards banning celebrity endorsements is also propagated.

According to a draft presented by the Health and Family Welfare Ministry, as per an amendment to the Drugs and Magic Remedies (Objectionable Advertisements Act, 1954), magic fairness remedies, as well as claims citing cures for AIDS, will be harshly prosecuted and come under the scanner.

The jail terms for offenders will be almost five years long with a Rs 50 lakh fine. Apart from fairness creams, almost 78 diseases have come under the ban.

Celebrities have come out with statements regarding this move, Taapsee Pannu revealed, “I hope it impacts consumers and they stop buying these fairness creams and realize that’s no standard of beauty. It is a very personal choice of a human being to look the way he or she wants to but if I am asked, I will never endorse fairness as benchmark for beauty.”

According to Dia Mirza, “As we evolve in our understanding of what kind of advertising perpetuates stereotypes, gender discrimination and falsehoods, we must collectively take responsibility to ensure this ends.”

Previously big stars like Shah Rukh Khan, Sonam Kapoor, Yami Gautam, John Abraham and Alia Bhatt have also personally endorsed creams of this nature. These promotions gave birth to large amounts of criticism, and even sparked a debate when actor Abhay Deol called out the celebrities involved, in a Twitter post.

Artiste Sona Mohapatra who works as a brand manager for FMCG, is of the opinion that being conscience of choices is important before agreeing to endorse such content.

She concluded the country’s move in the best of ways by stating, “Our country and society as a whole has suffered the debilitating effect of being colonised for years and has been inflicted with the harmful subjugation and mental conditioning of being ‘inferior’ due to issues like our ethnicity and the colour of our skin. It is ridiculous that we fuel this toxic low self-esteem amongst our people even after so many decades of being free from our white exploiters from the past.”

“A deracinated people and low self-esteem plays havoc in the progress of a country and in fact in the survival of a civilization. Ours is a rare undivided one for 5000 years and we should be proud of celebrating our natural skin colour.”