Complexion has always been the only existential concern of women in Indian society. The fairer, the better is the motto! One simply needs to be married off. Why bother with anything else? But it is time we embrace all Indian skin colours and celebrate them. Wheatish skin tone is perhaps the most common skin tone found in the country. It is right between the fair and dusky complexion with a yellow undertone. It can be simply called medium or light brown.
Wheatish skin is beautiful, and women who are not fair must not feel degraded by society. People, especially women, have always tried to attain fairer skin in order to be accepted and avoid ridicule. Unfortunately, they have often blindly followed myths without logical or scientific explanations. Today, we aim to bust these myths and hope to take a step towards building a more complexion neutral society.
Tea Will Make You Darker
One of the ridiculous myths is that tea or coffee can alter your skin tone. It cannot manipulate the melanin pigmentation of your skin. When consumed in moderation, both are healthy drinks, and one should not have to worry about getting darker before including them in your diet. If you are fair, you won’t acquire wheatish skin, or someone with wheatish skin will not become dusky even if they consume tea thrice a day.
Pregnant Women Should Drink Saffron Milk
It is believed that when a woman drinks saffron milk during her pregnancy, the child born would be fair. But, just like the tea myth, milk, nor saffron cannot manipulate your own melanin, let alone the child’s complexion.
There is no way for you to make your child fair or dark. The entirety of it rests on his or her genes and heredity. No amount of external conduct can decide if your child will have fair skin, wheatish skin or dark skin. But you should maintain a healthy diet that includes loads of milk to keep the baby healthy, and that, of course, is more important.
Good Makeup is One that Makes You Look Fair
The objective of makeup is never to hide your skin beneath a layer of superficiality. Instead, makeup tries to enhance your features and conceal little imperfections like stubborn acne or tired dark circles.
Do not pick a lighter foundation shade to make you look fair. It will only end up making you look ashy and patchy. You must choose your shade carefully. It should be closest to your original skin colour and must match your undertone.
If You Are Not Fair, You Are Not Enough
Someone with dusky or wheatish skin must have, at some point, faced prejudice. Be it for marriage, certain professions, plays and cinema, being fair is one of the major criteria. Most advertisements for marriage come with a clause that they are looking for someone ‘fair’.
This is responsible for wrecking a person’s self-esteem for a lifetime, especially if the prejudice happens at a developing stage of life. One should never tell your worth based on your skin colour. It is crude and unfair. Luckily, workplaces are shaking off this prejudice, and we hope to see a similar kind of progress in society. It is time that India gives up on its fair obsession and celebrates all other hues that look equally beautiful.
Breaking such baseless myths is very important as it can help normalise different skin colours on a broader level. For example, there should be no need for you to give up on tea or coffee to appear fair. Similarly, a mother’s primary concern regarding her unborn child should be health and not skin colour.