Introduced in India in 1975, Fair & Lovely became one of Hindustan Unilever’s most commercially successful cosmetic brands, reportedly controlling about 80 percent of India’s skin-lightening cream market by 2012. Its marketing made complexion a social hierarchy: television advertisements and promotional campaigns commonly presented lighter skin as the route to beauty, romance, confidence, employment, and upward mobility, while darker skin was depicted as an obstacle that could be corrected by the product. Critics argued that this was not merely conventional beauty advertising but the commercial exploitation of colorism, particularly among lower- and middle-income consumers and even girls reportedly as young as 12 to 14. Hindustan Unilever’s own research was cited as saying that many Indian women viewed lighter skin as aspirational, comparable to losing weight or obtaining an education, illustrating how deeply the brand’s sales strategy was tied to existing social prejudice.
The controversy intensified across South Asia as activists and commentators challenged the assumption that whiteness or lightness represented beauty and success. In 2020, Sunny Jain, then president of Unilever’s Beauty & Personal Care division, acknowledged that words such as “fair,” “white,” and “light” were inappropriate and announced changes to the brand’s advertising, communications, and packaging. Unilever renamed Fair & Lovely “Glow & Lovely” and promised imagery featuring women with a broader range of skin tones. Critics responded that the rebrand left the underlying product and the skin-lightening market intact: changing the name, they argued, did not resolve the social damage of selling complexion alteration as a path to acceptance. Unilever further insisted that the cream was not a skin-bleaching product, describing it instead as a formula intended to improve skin texture, firmness, and barrier function, but the episode became a major case study in how multinational beauty companies profited from and later attempted to cosmetically reframe entrenched color prejudice.
