Beware, fairness claims just skin-deep

If you aren’t fair, don’t expect life to be fair to you. You can hide behind closed doors and weep silently. Until you do the wise...

If you aren’t fair, don’t expect life to be fair to you. You can hide behind closed doors and weep silently. Until you do the wise thing: buy a fairness cream. That’s what the TV ads tell you, adding insult to injury. Women, not men, need to worry about their skin colour.

Forget about these ads exploiting, and hardening in the process, biases and prejudices that thankfully society has been shedding. That’s what Minister for Information and Broadcasting Ravi Shankar Prasad was getting incensed over even today at a meeting of state women commissions in New Delhi. For a moment, let’s forget that. Let’s ask just one question: Are these products genuine?

The medical fraternity is unanimous in dismissing these claims as false. And the licensing authorities have never allowed the sale of any cream as a ‘‘fairness product’’, but the ads are unlikely to go away.

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Doctors warn that when Fair & Lovely claims to lighten your skin colour through ingredients like ‘‘kumkumadi tailam and hydrolysed milk protein’’ or Emami Naturally Fair promises to lighten it through a combination of pearls, aloevera and Spanish saffron, take the claims with a pinch of salt. Niacimide seems to be favoured by the companies the most since both Fair & Lovely and Fairever use it.

Though one of the companies claims to sell its products to six crore people annually, doctors are dismissive. ‘‘None of these ingredients can bring about a change in a person’s natural skin colour which depends on the amount of melanocytes present. And there is no way you can change it by applying any amount of these fairness creams,’’ says Dr V K Sharma, Professor and Head of Department of Dermatology at AIIMS.

‘‘Ingredients like titanium dioxide, nicotimide (Vitamin B3), hydrolysed milk proteins (key ingredients listed on the Fair & Lovely packs) and pearls and saffron cannot change the skin colour. Titanium dioxide has sun protection effect and nicotimide increases circulation, producing a temporary redness,’’ he says.

Dr Sharma says any change in the skin colour can be brought about only by damaging the melanocytes which, however, can have a carcinogenic effect in the long run.

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Experts blame the registration process. The licences have to be issued by the office of the State Drug Controller or Food and Drugs Administration Commissioner of the states they are manufactured in. ‘‘The Drug and Cosmetics Act does not make it mandatory to declare all the contents. The herbal cosmetics don’t have to produce even the evidence of clinical trials,’’ says Dr Sharma.

The authorities agree. ‘‘The companies have to supply the formula but need not give the percentages of each ingredient used,’’ says an official at the Department of Delhi Drug Control.

However, the authorities in Mumbai, where most of these companies are registered, seemed to have taken notice. ‘‘Though there are no guidelines regarding the advertisements at the time of issuing licenses, we have recently called representatives of all these companies and asked them not to make such claims,’’ said R V Yadav, Joint Commissioner, FDA headquarters, Mumbai.