Colourism in Mass Media — A Sociological Study of Skin Tone Bias in Indian Television, Film, and Advertising

I wanted to understand how mass media in India — film, TV, advertising, the whole visual ecosystem — keeps colourism alive, even now, even when everyone agrees out loud that it shouldn’t exist. The deceptively simple question underneath it was: why does fair skin keep showing up as the visual shorthand for good, successful, desirable, and dark skin as the shorthand for everything else — the servant, the villain, the comic relief.

I built the project around three research questions — how media portrayal of skin tone affects beauty standards and self-esteem, how lead versus supporting roles get split along colour lines, and how all of this filters into people’s actual self-image and social interactions — and ran a survey of 30 young urban Indians to test whether my hypothesis actually held up against lived experience, not just my own reading of Bollywood.

I started with the historical layer because I didn’t want this to read as just “ads are bad”. I needed to root it. So I went back to the Varna system and the pre-colonial associations between skin tone and social hierarchy, then traced how British colonial rule formalised and scientised that bias through administrative preference and pseudo-scientific racial classification, and then how post-independence cinema and the liberalisation-era beauty industry picked that baton straight back up. From there, I moved into the socio-cultural implications — marriage market dynamics, dowry penalties tied to skin tone, employment discrimination — because I wanted the project to show this wasn’t just an aesthetic preference, it had economic teeth. Then I got into the caste and regional intersections, which was honestly the part that complicated my own assumptions the most, since the caste-colour link isn’t as clean or consistent as the popular narrative suggests.

After the historical and structural grounding, I moved into the actual media analysis — breaking it down medium by medium. Television and film first, where I pulled specific examples like Cocktail and Bala to show how even “critical” films end up reproducing the bias through lighting and casting choices. Then, advertising, where the Fair & Lovely case study became almost the central artefact of the whole section — that ad’s narrative arc is so explicit it barely needs interpretation. Then print media and the cover model statistics, and finally social media, where I wanted to show both sides — the beauty filter defaults that lighten skin without consent, but also the #DarkIsBeautiful pushback as a sign that the discourse is shifting, even if slowly.

Once the media analysis was done, I designed the survey itself, which took some thinking through — I had to decide between interviews, surveys, observation, and focus groups, and went with surveys because I needed scale and lower interviewer bias, even knowing I’d lose some depth. I ran it with 30 respondents, mostly female, mostly 15–17, skewed urban and English-media-consuming, which I flagged upfront as a limitation rather than hiding it. Then I went through and matched every survey finding back to my three research questions one by one, instead of just dumping the data — so the 73% who saw dark-skinned characters as servants, the 60% who said fair-skinned characters get coded as more desirable, all of it got tied directly back to the original questions I’d set out to answer.

What surprised me most was how consistent the data was. I expected more disagreement, more nuance in the responses, but instead I got near-unanimous confirmation across almost every question, which made me wonder if the survey design itself was leading respondents toward the conclusion I already suspected, or if the bias really is just that obvious once you ask people to look for it. I also realised partway through that judging whether a character “is” fair or dark-skinned is itself a subjective act, which is a strange thing to sit with when you’re trying to be objective about a study on subjective perception.

If I did this again, I’d want a more regionally and economically diverse respondent pool — the urban, English-consuming skew of my sample means I was really studying one slice of how colourism gets perceived, not the whole picture, and the project itself says as much in its limitations. I’d also push harder on the caste section, because that was the part where my own assumptions got the most disrupted, and I don’t think I fully resolved that complexity in the final write-up.

In the end, the project landed where I expected it to, but for reasons I didn’t fully expect going in — mass media doesn’t just reflect colourism, it actively manufactures and commercialises it, turning a social bias into something with a marketing budget. Fair skin gets visually coded into success, kindness, romantic desirability, and education, while dark skin gets coded into servitude, villainy, and comic relief, and that coding doesn’t stay on screen — it leaks into self-esteem, into who gets cast as believable in a leading role, into who feels like they match the “ideal” and who doesn’t. The most uncomfortable finding for me wasn’t the historical material, which I expected to be damning — it was how much of this persists in 2024–2025 media, dressed up in euphemism (“brightening,” “even-toned”) rather than disappearing.