CARE Bangladesh's country director also had to worry whether the aparajitas selling Fair & Lovely, a skin-lightening cream, would garner negative publicity.
What is it about the branding or marketing that has low-income consumers spending the money they have on a skin lightening cream like Fair & Lovely rather than fluoride toothpaste for their children?
But it's also undeniable that Indians who grew up in the 80s and 90s have been in many ways morally and imaginatively conservative: they are the context, for instance, in which wish-fulfilling skin lighteners like Fair & Lovely have flourished.
Culturally, for many Indians, fair is lovely and dark is not.
In India, where I was born, a best-selling line of women's cosmetics called Fair and Lovely has recently been supplemented by a product aimed at men called Fair and Handsome.
Fair and Lovely (manufactured by Hindustan Lever Limited, one of India's largest manufacturing and marketing conglomerates and a subsidiary of the UK-based Unilever) is the clear market leader.
The Fair and Lovely ideal (which blatantly equates light skin with social acceptance and sexual attractiveness in its advertising) is now also extending to men.
The old saying was that there was a church for every week and a pub for every day of the year... there's a fair few lovely examples of both left, but ironically we have the highest atheist population in the UK according to the last census.
It is almost as if nobody remembers the Fair and Lovely ad from just a few years ago, in which a girl's first response to her father lamenting the lack of a son is to buy a tube of the fairness cream – a purchase which leads, naturally, to an unspecified great job and proud parents.
We'll gently walk, and sweetly talk, Till the silent moon shines clearly; I'll grasp thy waist, and, fondly prest, Swear how I love thee dearly: Not vernal show'rs to budding flow'rs, Not Autumn to the farmer, So dear can be, as thou to me, My fair, my lovely charmer!
