The battle to end the world's obsession with lighter skin

"It starts when children are young: the moment a child is born, relatives start comparing siblings' skin colour. It starts in your own family – but people don't want to talk about it openly."

Kavitha Emmanuel is the founder of Women of Worth, an Indian NGO that is standing up to bias toward lighter skin. The Dark Is Beautiful campaign, launched in 2009, is not "anti-white", she says, but about inclusivity – beauty beyond colour. It carries celebrity endorsement, most notably from the Bollywood actor Nandita Das, and provides a forum for people to share their personal stories of skin colour bias.

The campaign runs media literacy workshops and advocacy programmes in schools to counteract colour bias. Emmanuel says this even occurs in school textbooks, where a picture of a fair-skinned girl might be labelled "beautiful" and a darker one "ugly".

"Some children are really shocked that this affects them so intensely," Emmanuel says. "Some are in tears [during the workshops]."

A perfect life from perfect skin – but only for those of the right shade – is the message and mindset that's being passed down. This has spawned a multibillion-dollar industry in cosmetic creams and invasive procedures such as skin bleaching, chemical peels, laser treatments, steroid cocktails, "whitening" pills and intravenous injections – all with varying effectiveness and health risks. It's more than a bias, it's a dangerous cultural obsession.

Multinational cosmetics brands have found a lucrative market: global spending on skin lightening is projected to triple to $31.2bn (£24bn) by 2024, according to a report released in June 2017 by the research firm Global Industry Analysts. The driving force, it says, is "the still rampant darker skin stigma, and rigid cultural perception that correlates lighter skin tone with beauty and personal success".

"This is not bias. This is racism," says Sunil Bhatia, a professor of human development at Connecticut College. Bhatia recently wrote in US News & World Report about deep-rooted internalised racism and social hierarchies based on skin colour.

In India, these were codified in the caste system, the ancient Hindu classification in which birth determined occupation and social stratum. At the top, Brahmins were priests and intellectuals; at the bottom, outcastes were confined to the least-desired jobs such as latrine cleaners. Bhatia says caste may have been about more than just occupation: the darker you looked, the lower your place in the social hierarchy.

Fair skin bias was perpetuated and strongly reinforced by colonialism, not just in India but in dozens of countries ruled by a European power. It's the idea that the ruler is fair-skinned, says Emmanuel: "All around the world, it was a fact that the rich could stay indoors versus the poor who worked outside and were dark-skinned."

Now globalisation is spreading the bias. "There is an interesting whiteness travelling from the US to shopping malls in other countries, featuring white models," Bhatia says. "You can trace a line from colonialism, post-colonialism and globalisation."

Western beauty ideals, including fair skin, dominate worldwide. And with these ideals come products to service them. In Nigeria, 77% of the country's women use skin-lightening agents; in Togo, 59%. But the largest and fastest-growing markets are in the Asia-Pacific region. In India, a typical supermarket will have a wall of personal care products featuring "whitening" moisturiser or "lightening" body creams from wellknown brands.