These commercials for “Fair & Lovely,” a skin whitening product from overseas, creep us out. They show girls with darker skin being denied jobs and being scoffed at by pale ladies at some sort of counter. That’s just messed up. In addition, it seems that skin whitening products are full of mercury and probably really bad for you. (PDF) Fun.

It’s sort of like the pressure to be tan (our Irish ass can certainly relate to that), but we’ve never seen a commercial that suggested we couldn’t get a job without a tan. Harsh. Here’s another one that won’t embed. —MEGHANN MARCO

[via BuzzFeed]
Telling India’s Modern Women They Have Power, Even Over Their Skin Tone [NYT]

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