A Twitter user going by the handle @labellagorda noticed something peculiar about the list of this year’s Miss India contestants. Tweeting about it with a picture of all the contestants’ faces, she wrote, “Miss India contestants. They all have the same hair, and the SAME SKIN COLOUR, and I’m going to hazard a guess that their heights and vital stats will also be similar. So much for India being a ‘diverse’ country.”
Miss India contestants. They all have the same hair, and the SAME SKIN COLOUR, and I’m going to hazard a guess that their heights and vital stats will also be similar. So much for India being a ‘diverse’ country. pic.twitter.com/L4yXG0WvRu
— labellagorda (@labellagorda) May 27, 2019
About 48 hours since she put the tweet out into the universe, it has gained a decent amount of traction. Indicative of the fact, that many people see the point she’s trying to make. Not just India, a conventional parameter of beauty (especially for women) has been peddled by the pop-culture zeitgeist. As the tweet suggests, the beauty industry has hardly ever tried to push for a different skin-tone, a different style of hair or an unconventional body-type.
And as sad as it is, things look less-inclusive than ever in 2019. At a time when even Hollywood has bowed down to the pressure of a more inclusive superhero universe, it’s baffling to see India’s continued affair with fair skin and a standard vital stats that can be considered ‘model type’. For a country as diverse as India, isn’t this an unfair/dishonest precedent to set?
I remember reading a few years ago that Miss USA actually had more diverse contestants than Miss India. I know American TV definitely has more women from all ethnicities, and definitely more brown Indian-origin women.
— Suchi Govindarajan (@suchiswriting) May 27, 2019
My tweet from last year nothing changes.
– The future is here. We will all be clones and look like photocopies of each other…#clones #photocopies #same pic.twitter.com/8fArH2TOpT— Ruchira Mittal (@taruche) May 27, 2019
They look like clones of each other. If that’s even a thing
— Partha Srinivasan (@parthans) May 27, 2019
@labellagorda’s tweet got an overwhelmingly positive response with more than a few people seeing the point she’s trying to make. It’s time for the beauty industry to be more inclusive. And fair skin has really got to go, it’s 2019 for godsake.
