KEY POINTS:
The recent furore over a L'Oreal ad featuring Beyonce Knowles highlighted the cultural sensitivities around issues of race, beauty and success.
So, was that picture of Beyonce, looking sultry and wide-eyed as she poses for a L'Oreal advert, doctored to make her skin look lighter? The company itself swears blind that it wasn't.
But whatever the truth of the headlines, the whole episode has underlined that for millions of people, skin colour is still a contentious issue.
It matters in Bangladesh, where some elderly women still tell granddaughters to avoid tea lest it make their faces darken. It matters in Kenya, where a friend bemoans the fact that the "beautiful" (read pale) are always the ones who make it as television stars.
It matters across southern Africa - in Malawi, Zambia, Botswana and beyond - where village stores line up skin-lightening products alongside the staple offerings of sweets, bottles of pop and razors.
And I know that it matters greatly in India, my country of origin, where wedding adverts include a request for "complexion", with "fair" counting as good and "very fair" as excellent.
In a country where skin colour has become a multimillion-dollar industry, there is even a word for those that are not quite white enough to be deemed light-skinned, but not too dark either - they are called "wheatish".
There is also a Unilever product that promises "total fairness" with enormous sales. Fair and Lovely parades its products through clips showing women applying the cream, turning a paler shade of brown and then miraculously transforming into successful film stars overnight.
In one, a woman hoping to become a television presenter says: "Just before my fourth interview, I realised that the obstacle to obtaining my dream job was my skin colour."
There is no question that the adverts make me think there must be something inherently racist and oppressive about this trend. That they imply that people in India are more likely to be successful if they are pale.
But this is a complex issue. For example, just how does the deep desire among people in India, Pakistan, Kenya, Malawi and beyond to be fair compare to the desperation among British, Americans, Europeans and Australians and New Zealanders to tan their skin - sometimes until it is leathery and brown?
And what makes bleaching the surface of your face until the colour fades away worse than injecting Botox into the muscles beneath to prevent movement and wrinkles. Having a surgeon fracture your bones in order to straighten your nose, or getting someone to suck out the fat in your stomach and thighs?
Striving to be beautiful is a global phenomenon - should skin-lightening be seen as any different?
I'm not sure, but to me this trend matters. Because the inherent assumption when people pile on these products is that being white is somehow more beautiful than being brown, and that, in turn, is preferable to being black.
As well as becoming a race issue, that also makes it a class issue. In India, for instance, the people of the lower castes are almost always darker-skinned than those of higher ones.
And the notion that "fair is better" is so ingrained in some communities that, when I asked an Asian friend why it was, they responded: "Because people who are fair are 80 per cent more beautiful."
The same person winces if I allow myself to go dark in the sun and once boasted that their relative's new fiancee was "very light-skinned".
Another friend described how important skin colour was to her Bangladeshi in-laws. When she was pregnant, they encouraged her to drink milk and avoid dark foods and tea to give the baby the best chance of being fair.
Her (quite pale) father-in-law, meanwhile, argued that it was his "good genes" that would ensure the baby was not too dark. Another family, originally from Kolkata in India, talked about how one set of siblings were all different shades because of the mother's eating behaviour during each pregnancy.
I think it is worrying that people think this issue is so important, but there is no denying that - in show business, at least - it does affect people's chances of employment.
Scour the internet for images of black women chosen to appear in hip-hop or rap videos - they are far more likely to be fair-skinned than dark. Black actresses and singers who are considered the most beautiful are also often fairer - such as Beyonce or Halle Berry.
But perhaps the tide is turning. Women with darker skin are certainly becoming more prevalent among the world's supermodels and when Italian Vogue recently published a "black edition", it caused such phenomenal demand that Conde Nast printed an extra 40,000 copies.
In India, meanwhile, Bipasha Basu is a hugely successful Bollywood actress and model - that is despite thinking that she was ugly as a child because her skin was (very slightly) darker than some models of the time.
Basu, whose complexion is often described as "dusky", has won the title of "India's Most Desirable Woman".
It is worth adding, however, that, while she is described as a successful star with slightly darker skin, most of the images of her still appear quite pale.
Now is the time to start realising that as well as not judging people on skin colour, we should not judge them on the shade of their skin.
But perhaps that is as forlorn as hoping that one day we stop judging each other on looks at all.
- OBSERVER
