Bleach Please: A Survival Guide to the White Indian Fantasy
India is a land of rich cultural diversity and 1.4 billion people united by a single dream to look like an illuminated LED bulb. While people in the West spend billions baking in the sun to look sun kissed our ancient civilization knows better. We prefer to look like we have been thoroughly kissed by a tub of titanium dioxide. In this country human worth is not measured by character or intelligence but by the precise shade of your epidermis. This makes the pursuit of whiteness less of a beauty routine and more of a mandatory survival strategy.
The dedication to this bleach soaked dream begins long before you even have a face. The moment a woman conceives a frantic kitchen alchemy takes over. Forget prenatal vitamins because the fetus must be thoroughly marinated. Pregnant mothers are forced to chug gallons of milk laced with saffron because the logic is flawless. Saffron is yellow and milk is white so if you mix them together your baby will bypass all ancestral genetics and emerge looking like a Nordic prince. These women are locked indoors during lunar eclipses because the cosmic shadows might permanently stain the babys future marriage prospects. When the infant finally arrives if it dares to look like a normal human being belonging to this subcontinent the damage control begins. The child is immediately subjected to the ubtan assault which is a sandpaper like paste of turmeric and chickpea flour designed to literally scrub the original sin of melanin right off their newborn skin.
If the scrubbing fails the child grows up learning the complex vocabulary of Indian colourism. You are never just fair. You must aspire to be Milky White or Gora Chitta or at the very worst Wheatish. Wheatish is the absolute maximum threshold of acceptable darkness and it is usually reserved only for men with exceptionally large bank accounts. For everyone else darkness is treated like a terminal contagious disease. Relatives will look at a darker child and sigh heavily to console the parents by saying that the features are very sharp. This is just the polite Indian translation for a tragic shame about the complexion but at least the nose might slice through the disappointment.
By the time adulthood hits the matrimonial market demands a visual contrast so stark that wedding photos look like an optical illusion. If a bride does not blend seamlessly into her white lehenga the wedding videographer will have to spend three weeks in post production manually cranking up the exposure until her facial features completely disappear into a glorious blinding void. To achieve this aesthetic generations have slathered their faces with chemical pastes containing enough steroids to clone a horse. For decades tube shaped messiahs promised to turn users from depressed unmarried and unemployed to billionaire CEO in just seven days. Sure your skin barrier might become so dangerously thin that your capillaries are visible to the naked eye but that is a small price to pay for corporate upward mobility and parental approval.
Recently the multi billion dollar beauty industry underwent a progressive pivot. Society decided the word Fair was problematic so to fix systemic racism companies changed their product names to Glow or Bright or Radiant. Now you are not trying to change your race and you are just trying to emit light like a radioactive isotope. The ultimate goal of the Indian skincare journey is total anatomical transparency. We will not stop bleaching and scrubbing and hiding from the sun until our skin is so pale and translucent that you can actually see our internal organs functioning. Only then when we are walking talking ghosts will our aunties look at us and nod approvingly to say look at that glow.