Campaign
#Colourmeright
Smashing stereotypes & stigmas to empower people of colors.
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The Indian fixation with pale complexion is well-known and deeply ingrained. Color bias is pervasive and openly practiced throughout the country. Skin color, according to Indian culture, defines a person's value. In our society, all qualities are connected with the word "fair," but anything dark is associated with negative connotations. TV shows, movies, billboards, and commercials all reinforce the notion that "fair is beautiful.
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"A movement dubbed #ColourMeRight is being launched by dark brown ladies (as she prefers to be addressed) to help give her young child a better future. As a caring mother, she does not want her daughter to encounter the biases she has faced and suffered as a result of her dark brown skin color. She wishes for her kid to grow up in a progressive atmosphere that embraces her for who she is and cherishes her character, uniqueness, strengths, and ideals. She hopes that by launching this campaign, she might persuade Indian media to stop presenting individuals with darker skin tones as inferior and to provide dark-skinned role models for young children like her daughter to look up to.
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The first petition she filed as part of the #ColourMeRight campaign was addressed at Tanishq, a prominent jewellery manufacturer in India. In one of its advertising efforts, the firm utilized the phrase "Jewellery for every wedding in India." However, these advertisements solely depicted fair-skinned brides. Tanishq responded to her petition when it received over a thousand signatures. In a statement, the business stated that it will "produce advertising that represent the really varied nature of the country."
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The second petition she initiated was during Lakme Fashion Week in Mumbai, when she wanted to persuade the company Lakme to make a promise to have more inclusive commercials that include women of all skin tones rather than only white women.
#Unfairandlovely
A new worldwide anti-colorism social media movement, #unfairandlovely, is questioning the commonly held assumption that pale skin is the most attractive in many regions of the world. Women with "fair complexions" are in great demand in South Asian matrimonial advertising, and millions of men and women throughout the world have resorted to whitening their skin. Campaigners have attempted to combat this idea throughout the years, arguing that beauty is more than skin deep and that dark is also lovely.
In recent weeks, three students from the University of Texas in Austin have started a new campaign that has sparked worldwide discussion on social media. It was inspired by a project started in December by Pax Jones, a 21-year-old black student at the University of Texas at Austin. She made a picture series of her South Asian pupils, sisters Mirusha and Yanusha Yogarajah. "Our purpose was to oppose colorism and the media's underrepresentation of persons of colour. We were attempting to confront how colorism pervades our lives "Ms Jones spoke to the BBC by phone from Austin.
The "Unfair & Lovely" series was a smash sensation, inspiring the hashtag #unfairandlovely, named after the highly famous Indian skin-lightening lotion Fair and Lovely. The initiative, which invited people with dark complexion to upload images on social media, sparked spirited conversations on Twitter and Facebook, and over 1,000 people posted photos on Instagram.
#Darkisbeautiful
Kavitha Emmanuel is the founder of Women of Worth, an Indian NGO that is combating bigotry against those with lighter complexion. She claims that the Dark Is Beautiful campaign, which was started in 2009, is not "anti-white," but rather about inclusiveness — beauty beyond colour. It has celebrity support, most notably from Bollywood star Nandita Das, and it gives a venue for people to express their personal experiences with skin colour bias.
To combat colour bias, the campaign offers media literacy training and advocacy programmes in schools. According to Emmanuel, this also happens in school textbooks, where an image of a fair-skinned female may be labelled "beautiful" and a darker one "ugly."
Nandita Das relaunched her campaign as India's Got Color with a video in September 2019. India's Got Colour features a largely black-colored theme with an army of celebrities, in a very provocative tone, reprimanding the audience for the pervasive concern with fairness and discriminatory attitude toward persons of colour. She came up with the idea of making a snappy and youth-friendly PSA. Our youthful brains are the ones who will shift the public dialogue on this subject and make a practical difference. The PSA attempts to shift the narrative to a more comprehensive celebration of diversity. After all, there are over 1.3 billion people with a variety of skin tones."
#darkisdivine
Dark Is Divine seeks to dispel the notion that beauty can only be found in white. It is a programme aimed at transforming Asia into an area where black skin colour is accepted as readily as light skin colour, to the point where the colour of a woman's skin is finally irrelevant. Dark Is Divine seeks to dispel the notion that beauty can only be found in white. It is a campaign aimed at transforming Asia, particularly Pakistan, India, Taiwan, and the Philippines, into an area where black skin colour is accepted as readily as light skin colour, to the point where the colour of a woman's skin finally has no significance.
