“Beta…Chai mat peeyo kali ho jaogi…Dudh peeyo dudh tbhi to gori hogi…” says a typical neighborhood aunty.
Countless times the youth and children of India go through the “comments” and “advises” from relatives, teachers, family, friends, beautician in the beauty parlor and the list goes on and on about their skin tone.
If you’re a child with a darker skin tone in India, then you will have multiple people in your life sharing their “concerns” about your skin tone and how you ‘must’ apply various creams and natural products to become “fairer”.

The biggest concern they have is “Who will marry you with this skin tone?” In our country children always face discrimination based on their skin tone, and that is a harsh truth, the place where we send children to learn about equality, morals and values often make them isolated based on their skin tone, developing low confidence and self doubt in them.

The concept of beauty has always been about “fairness” in our culture and not the inner beauty of a person. Growing up as a teenager in India, they are exposed to an environment where the “fairer” child (mostly girls) finds more love interests and favoring of teachers than the ones with a darker skin tone. This leaves the teenagers with darker skin tone feeling “ugly” because of the wrong way society perceives beauty. No one is willing to see beneath the skin and understand the inner beauty of a person, be it a dark skin tone or a lighter skin tone and that results in the person thinking that they will never be good enough just because they have more melanin in their skin.  Whose fault is it?

This comes a long way back when Aryans came to India and gave birth to Aryan racial supremacy based on height, sharp noses and lighter skin color, dominating the social hierarchy practices in India. The upper caste members were usually the ones with the “genes” of Aryans and termed themselves not only as “superior race” but also “pure” and “noble” based on their skin tone in comparison with the ones with the darker skin tone who were considered to be “racially inferior”.

Then came the British rule that fueled this discrimination based on skin color as they constantly favored “fairer” Indians over “dark skinned” ones in terms of jobs and other factors. They constantly considered themselves to be of a superior race primarily based on skin tone and demeaned the “darker” Indians.

The low self esteem that it caused Indians is still visible till date. We started to discriminate among ourselves based on color. So many well known beauty brands openly delivered advertisements in which they showed how a person lacks in everything in Life as long as they are dark and as soon as they apply the beauty cream, they magically become fairer and everything becomes meaningful in life again. This is wrong in so many ways! What are we feeding to the minds of our children?

The concept that having a darker skin tone means that one is “ugly” or “not successful in life” means nothing but a fact that we have a rotten concept and this concept needs to change.

What is light without the dark anyway? Meaningless.

Beauty belongs to dark as much as it belongs to the lighter skin tones. All skin colors are beautiful and we personally believe no matter what your skin tone is, your pure heart is what makes you beautiful as well as successful in Life.

The history and the present are full of examples of beautiful dark skin models as well as bold and rich personalities in every field. To name a few: “The Queen of Dark” Nyakim Gatwech, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Usain Bolt, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Hima Das…and these are just a few of many more beautiful people all over the world.

Everyone is beautiful. Accept and respect yourself and see how the world will change itself to follow you. You don’t need anyone’s opinion to embrace your beauty!