Tannishtha Chatterjee on obsession with fair skin: I take my daughter out in the sun, and I get to hear ‘Oh My God, you’re burning’

Actor Tannishtha Chatterjee, who has always maintained her stance against colour biases and fairness products, is happy that a leading brand recently took a step towards correcting things — by removing words like fairness, lightening, whitening from their range beauty products.

“It’s about time, they should have done it many years back,” she tells us, hailing the move.

However, Chatterjee is quick to add that it’s still ingrained deep in the minds of people.

“You see how kids behave. Because of social consciousness, people don’t talk about it openly, but it’s still there at the back of your mind. It should get removed properly from our pop culture, whether it is fairness creams or Bollywood culture. When kids grow up in such a world, things will start changing,” opines the 39-year-old. 

Till date, the actor hears people saying they need to protect themselves and not step out in the sun because their skin will get tanned.

“My elders keep telling me to get Vitamin D. I take my daughter out in the sun, I still get to hear ‘Oh My God, you’re burning’. We can be unhealthy, but can’t have dark and tanned skin. Few years back, I was going to do a film on health, it never happened. While doing research for it, I was told Indian women have a lot of arthritis problems. One reason is that they’re not exposed to Vitamin D, as they’re scared they’ll get tanned. Your subconscious will say to take a shot of Vitamin D, but nothing can replace the sun,” Chatterjee reasons.

While one part of the debate also pointed fingers at celebrities endorsing such fairness products, Chatterjee believes that today’s generation is much smarter, and hence reluctant to take up such advertisements.

“The contemporary generation has awareness, which wasn’t there in the earlier generation. We speak out a lot more, we’re not scared. That definitely has helped. This is the first step. It’ll still take some time for us to internalise this,” she concludes.

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