Rosemary Pennington | Oct. 4, 2009
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| Photo by James Brosher |
| Researchers Kavitha Cardoza of WAMU and associate professor Radhika Parameswaran studied advertisements for skin-lightening products and India’s expanding role in global economics for their monograph published this month. Cardoza visited campus last week. |
“I had a friend, growing up, named Radhika too,” Parameswaran said. “We were Radhika-squared. And I knew, even though no one said this, I knew that she was Light Radhika and I was Dark Radhika. Being the dark one wasn’t good.”
No one knows why the centuries-old preference for light skin among women has continued, but Parameswaran said light-skinned women are considered the most beautiful. It is much easier for women with light skin to find husbands than those who are darker.
“I just remember a lot of stories,” Parameswaran said, “where women would be preparing to be married and then the marriage would be denied because their skin was too dark. It was very hurtful for them. There’s a lot of pain in that.”
That pain of being dark has led Indian women to look for ways of lightening their skin. Time-honored methods involve using turmeric and lemon juice. But for those with a little money to burn, a plethora of products on store shelves promise lighter skin in a bottle.
Parameswaran and research partner Kavitha Cardoza, a senior reporter at National Public Radio affiliate WAMU in Washington, D.C., decided to examine how these skin lightening agents, with names like Fair and Lovely, are marketed to women in India.
Cardoza visited the School of Journalism last week to speak to students in a number of different classes, including those enrolled in Parameswaran’s J510 Media and Society. With the students, she shared her experiences in the field, as well as her experience working with their professor.
There were a number of things that surprised Cardoza as she and Parameswaran compiled their research. There was also a lot that irritated her.
“You know, the one person who really angers me is Aishwarya Rai,” Cardoza said, referring to the former Miss World from India. Rai often is touted as the most beautiful woman in the world, she said. “Rai is naturally very light skinned. You see her with her family and they’re all darker, but she is very light. And you have this light-skinned woman who is selling these skin lightening creams. She doesn’t use them, but she’s telling dark skinned women they should buy them and they can be light and beautiful like her.”
Parameswaran and Cardoza conducted a textual analysis of print and television advertisements for these “fairness” products, looking for thematic glue that might bind them altogether into a kind of narrative whole. Their findings are being published this month in Journalism & Communication Monographs. Published only four times a year, the journal was started in 1966 and is considered one of the flagship publications of the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
“It’s very prestigious,” said David Weaver, the School of Journalism’s Roy W. Howard Research Professor. “Monographs are rarer than journal articles. They’re somewhere between article length and book length. They’re one of the few places you can publish research that’s too long for general journals. And they typically have very low acceptance rates.” He said 10 years ago, the journal had an acceptance rate of only 15 percent.
Parameswaran joins only a handful of School of Journalism faculty members who have published in Journalism & Communication Monographs. Her predecessors include Weaver and professor David Nord as well as retired faculty members professors Cleveland Wilhoit and Dan Drew.
Parameswaran and Cardoza’s study, “Melanin on the Margins: Advertising and the Cultural Politics of Fair/Light/White Beauty in India,” took almost seven years to complete and another two years to get published. The study was an attempt to make sense of the ads not only in light of views of beauty, but also in light of India’s expanding role in global economics.
“India’s role on the world stage is changing,” Parameswaran said. “It’s becoming a bigger player in the global economy, is moving from Third World to First World. And, so, these ads are telling people that they need to become modern, that, in order to become part of ‘New India,’ they need to buy these products. This becomes an issue of social mobility, the idea that if you have lighter skin you are more beautiful, you will be more successful, you will be able to change your place in society more easily.”
One fact Parameswaran brings up again and again when talking about her research is that skin lightening products now make up 40 to 50 percent of the cosmetics market in India. They’re also beginning to gobble up a larger share of the market in other Asian nations as well.
Gender Studies assistant professor Brenda Weber says that’s because people everywhere are feeling pressure to change their image to get ahead in the global marketplace. But it’s not just women who are seeking ways to change how they look.
“The number of men seeking plastic surgery in the United States has gone up 700 percent,” Weber said. “Men are increasingly being made to feel like they need cosmetics, so you have them purchasing, and using, products that code ‘feminine’ and that includes these skin lightening products.”
Exploring how skin lightening products are being marketed toward men is certainly something Parameswaran is interested in looking at the road. But one thing she and Cardoza want to emphasize about the research being published now is that, although women are buying things like Fair and Lovely, it’s not necessarily because they think the products are going to work.
“You know, in India, they have these little shampoo sachets, single servings,” Cardoza said, “and now these lightening creams are also selling these sachets of their products. They cost like 50 cents or something and they’re marketed toward poor women. You’re not going to get your skin lighter in a single serving.”
“In fact, they often know they won’t work,” Parameswaran agreed. “But that’s not what matters.”
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| Photo by James Brosher |
| WAMU’s Kavitha Cardoza spoke to Parameswaran’s J510 Media and Society class last week. She and Parameswaran spent seven years researching material for their study. |
“It’s about the fact they have disposable income at all. They can buy things they don’t need. Look at these things,” Parameswaran said, pointing to her earrings, “I don’t need them. I can’t eat them. I don’t want to admit how many of these I own. I buy them because I can. It’s kind of the same with Fair and Lovely. They may know it doesn’t work, but they buy it anyway. Because they can. For the fun of it.”
“I think this is really exciting,” Weber said of Parameswaran and Cardoza’s monograph. Weber says while there is a wealth of research about the intersection of beauty and advertising, the majority of it has been approached from a Western perspective.
Parameswaran and Cardoza’s work examines the issue from an Indian perspective and in Weber’s mind, “It’s something anyone engaged with these issues should be interested in. It can really expand opportunities for understanding and give us tools for re-assessing our own experiences.”
Parameswaran gave a number of talks on the study before the findings were published, including one at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. It was part of a series organized by the Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communication. Parameswaran spent last spring semester at Annenberg as a guest of the program conducting research and teaching.
Now that she’s back in Bloomington, and her monograph is being published, Parameswaran’s focusing on where her research will take her next. One thing’s for sure, though, it will almost certainly involve a trip or two back to India.
“The nice thing about my research is that I get to go back home,” Parameswaran said as she pointed to a picture of her niece hanging above the desk in her office. “And I get to see that little person. She means the world to me.”
