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Why India’s Fair Skin Business Is Booming

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Half a billion dollars is riding on the idea that lighter skin sells better in India.

VICE correspondent Gianna Toboni traveled to Mumbai for the HBO segment “Unfair” to trace how deep-rooted colorism has turned into a commercial machine. The report, titled “Why India’s Fair Skin Business Is Booming,” lays out an industry that generates close to $500 million a year selling the promise of a fairer complexion. Toboni talks to casting agents, dermatologists, and clinic operators who all profit, in one way or another, from the same underlying belief: paler skin opens doors that darker skin doesn’t.

• India’s skin-lightening industry is valued at nearly $500 million, according to the VICE investigation.
• Roughly 60% of women and 10% of men in India admit to using skin-lightening treatments or products.
• Bollywood casting agents interviewed for the piece openly acknowledge favoring and casting only lighter-skinned actors and models.

Bollywood’s Casting Bias

India’s film industry produces more movies annually than any other country on earth, and Toboni’s reporting shows how that scale amplifies a single, narrow beauty standard. Casting agents she meets in Mumbai don’t dance around the practice — they tell her directly that lighter-skinned actors and models get the calls, and darker-skinned talent gets passed over regardless of ability. That preference then ripples outward through advertising, television, and matrimonial culture, reinforcing the same hierarchy the report says traces back to caste and colonial-era social structures that equated pale skin with status and marriageability.

Inside the Clinics

Toboni sits down with dermatologist Dr. Satish Bhatia to unpack what people are actually doing to their bodies to chase a lighter shade. He describes a range that runs from chemical peels to intravenous glutathione injections, along with the medical fallout from aggressive bleaching agents — irritation, chemical burns, and other complications that patients are willing to risk for the aesthetic payoff. The report also visits Kaya Skin Clinic, one of the country’s mainstream aesthetic chains, to show how a legitimate medical-adjacent business model has been built directly on top of that social pressure.

Roughly 60% of women and 10% of men in India admit to using skin-lightening treatments or products.

A Colonial-Era Hierarchy, Monetized

What makes the segment land is how plainly it connects consumer behavior to history. Toboni frames the fairness obsession as something that predates any single product line — a caste-based and colonial hierarchy that long equated paler skin with higher social status, better marriage prospects, and professional advancement. The skin-lightening industry didn’t invent that bias; it simply found a way to sell a solution to it, one cream, peel, and injection at a time.

For readers who want more ground-level reporting on how deeply held social norms translate into real commerce, VICE’s documentaries catalogue and its ongoing interviews and interesting news coverage both dig into similar cultural-economics stories, from casting-room bias to the beauty industry’s broader reach.

Dr. Bhatia’s patients keep coming back for the same reason the casting agents keep making the same calls — the market rewards it, and nobody in the segment pretends otherwise. That’s the part of “Unfair” that sticks: not the chemical peels or the glutathione drips, but how casually everyone involved, from the clinic to the casting couch, admits what’s driving nearly half a billion dollars in annual sales.