#UnfairandLovely - Three Students Start Campaign Celebrating Dark Skin

India's obsession with fair skin is well documented: in 1978, Unilever launched Fair & Lovely cream, which has subsequently spawned numerous whitening face cleansers, shower gels and even vaginal washes that claim to lighten the surrounding skin.

Three students from the University of Texas, one is African-American and the others originate from Sri Lanka started a awareness-raising campaign on a new website called 'Unfair and lovely'. Through this campaign the three student cleverly fight and condemn this tendency to denigrate black women for the benefit of those with lighter skin.

This campaign was named after the skin lightening cream 'Fair and lovely' produced by Hindustan Unilever Company and ditributed in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Thailand and in other Souther Asia countries.

Cricket players and Bollywood stars regularly endorse these products. But now the film star Nandita Das has taken a stance against the craze and given her support to the Dark is Beautiful campaign which challenges the belief that success and beauty are determined by skin colour. "I want people to be comfortable in their own skin and realise that there is more to life than skin colour," she says, adding that an Indian paper had written "about my support for the campaign and then lightened the photo of me that went alongside it".

Consequently, African-American Pax Jones photographed the two sisters Mirusha and Yanusha Yogarajah and it quickly went viral. As a matter of fact, the three student took the decision to launch the 'Unfairandlovely' hashtag on the social network.

"Growing up, I never felt like my skin color was inferior. I was actually proud of my gold-skin times. Knowing how much gold is valued in India 😝 But as I grew up, I realized that so many of my friends were using skin lightening products especially their under arms. I was made to feel like it is wrong if you don't shave+have dark underarm skin tone at the age of 12. I saw parents teaching their kids that. I saw so many advertisements, South Indian movies showcasing white as beautiful, classy. Meaning that dark skinned people were from 'kuppam' or slums. Never feeling represented in the Indian media even when I am an Indian. We are not born with a preference for a skin color but society imposes it so much that some cave into this unrealistic expectation." -@rachellechandraan #reclaimthebindi x #unfairandlovely | #reclaimthebindiweek

A photo posted by Unfair & Lovely (@unfairandlovely_) on Mar 11, 2016 at 6:02am PST