I didn’t want to write a diary about the infamous black to white soap ad, but now I want to have the points I have been repeating all together in one place.
First, let’s consider what beauty commercials usually do.
They show a before, and an after.
Here’s you before you use the product, here’s you after you use the product.
The unidirectional nature of the time continuum means that it generally goes in that order in order to be most persuasive. From before to after.
Now let’s consider what soap does.
It cleans things. Changes them from dirty to clean. Just as “beauty products” in general are supposed to change things from “not as good” to “better.”
So the black woman changing into a *very* “fair” white woman and then changing into a third woman who, while not ethnically “white”, is still of lighter skin tone than the first model, is NOT SUBTLE as to which of the states is before and which is after, which is not as good and which is better.
Colorism is an issue in several Asian countries, so the third woman being Asian does not get the soap company off the hook with respect to cultural sensitivity, especially when their parent company Unilever is one of the largest manufacturers of skin lightening creams in India and Pakistan, including the infamous best-selling brand called “Fair and Lovely”. The small photo above with four shots of the same woman’s face, was taken from the Fair and Lovely India website. What do you think it portrays?
One or more of the following three things is true, and all are bad for the soap company (I am not naming them in case this was really some kind of guerilla marketing program intended to get the brand in the news):
(1) It is INTENTIONAL that the three ladies are not shown in the reverse order.
AND/OR
(2) a major corporation is completely out of touch and clueless about the extremely high level of racial tension in the US right now
AND/OR
(3) this major corporation has dozens of people involved in ad design, creation, production, and promotion, and none of them are PoC, or people with cross-cultural awareness, who could say um, are you aware that this could be seen as offensive?
It would be one thing if this were the first time this company ran into these problems.
I am not blaming this company for the long history of “black is dirty” and “black can be washed off” imagery that was used to sell soap in this country back in the day.
But just a few years back I remember people complaining about labeling for this “summer glow” moisturizing product, and apparently the company didn’t learn anything from it:
And a few years before that, the same company sparked a similar outrage (note the missing “p” on that word) about an unfortunately labeled body wash ad claiming to improve the look of your skin. Interestingly, the before and after labels seem to indicate the women get lighter as well as thinner! Who knew! And the company didn’t learn anything from that, either.
Have we EVER seen this in the reverse? Just try to imagine what this ad would look like if the models were reversed. I bet no one would approve it, and they might not even know why—it just wouldn’t “look right”.
I am old enough to remember when it was a novelty to see black faces in ads for personal hygiene products. No one saw a need to advertise toothpaste, shampoo, deodorant, or soap to us except in black specialty magazines like Jet. I remember the first television commercial I ever saw with a black person doing one of those in the shower covered with lather ads, and my mom saying “Well. Somebody finally figured out that black people buy soap.”
Now, in 2017, with the entire internet to choose from, I could not find an image for this diary of a woman with darker skin tone using shampoo or soap.
I wish we had the full 30 second commercial with all seven women. Maybe after the furor dies down, they will re-release the 30 second ad, which supposedly is better because the Nigerian model *is* shown again at the end of the ad.
But the 30 second ad is NOT what was released on FB and Twitter.
Someone should have purchased a clue and realized that the short gif with the three women, and the shortened gif with just the first two women, was going to push some obviously sensitive cultural buttons, at a time when people are risking their fcuking JOBS over trying to draw attention to issues of racial inequality.
But hey, to most folks, there’s nothing to see here. Don’t we have more important things to worry about than a “racist” soap ad? (For more fun, take note of who uses “scare quotes” around “racist” and who doesn’t.)
If liberal snowflakes didn’t keep pointing out that things are “racist” we wouldn;t *have* so many race problems in this country—am I white? I mean, am I right?
If racist is a word you would only apply to this ad with scare quotes, can we at least agree the ad was insensitive?
And can we also agree from a sheer capitalist point of view the ad is a failure—that is, assuming they want black women to buy their product(s). “Know your audience” used to be a basic tenet of the advertising business. But wait—maybe the black woman in the ad is intended to encourage *white* women to buy the product? See what a diverse and cool company we are! We have black models! Real beauty!
Last but not least, even if you do not want to call the ad itself racist, please understand this:
The background level of racism in this culture as a whole is responsible for the fact that no one in the entire long chain of advertising approval at that company knew or cared enough about racial sensitivity to even have it cross their mind that the ad could be taken in a different way.
Update: Apparently some people have not seen the original series of images and do not know what all the fuss is about.
Here is a still shot of the “two-model” version that many people reacted to first:
Here is a link to the “three-model” loop (from The Independent)
Here is a link to an annotated version of the three-model loop with some additional footage (from The Guardian)
So far we can’t find a link to the “13-second” version of the ad or the full 30-second version of the ad.