L’Oreal joins HUL, drops words like ‘fairness’ from products

National

L’Oreal will stop associating itself with words such as ‘light’, ‘fair’, and ‘white’,announced the brand a day after Unilever made a similar decision after its products were called out as ‘racist’. Unilever and L’Oreal are two big brands in the reservoir of beauty. Both of them have come out a range of skin whitening creams, which are sold throughout Asia, Middle East, Africa, and the Caribbean.

The theme on which their commercial campaigns were based are being questions across the globe. The commercials of these brands used to show two faces and portray white skin as better than the black. Recently these brands found themselves in the crosshairs of these critics for being racist.

This has happened in the backdrop of anti-racism protests around the world, following the death of George Floyd- a black man at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis. In response to this worldwide backlash against racial prejudice, first Hindustan Unilever Limited and now L’Oreal has dropped these labels.

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These two companies will, therefore, no longer call their skin-whitening creams as skin-whitening creams. Johnson & Johnson has also gone ahead and made the decision to stop selling skin whitening creams. These fairness products occupy a huge market in some countries. All this transformation in this industry is a result of robust criticism that was witnessed globally.

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