Designing a brand for Indian Skin

Roshnee Desai is the founder and creative director of LOCAL, a design studio based in India that works on brands that are rooted in the local, affecting the global.

As Indian Skin colour becomes a topic of debate and the rebranding of Fair & Lovely comes under scrutiny, it reminds me of the conversations and personal journeys that led to the genesis of Dr. Sheth’s for Indian Skin.

A beautiful brief and legacy

In 2016, before I had even started LOCAL, Dr. Aneesh Sheth reached out to me with an amazing brief: to create a line of luxury skincare products, made especially for Indian skin. What a unique product idea, and boy, was he the right man for the job!

He had just returned from New York with a Ph.D. in Pharmacology to join his mother, Dr. Rekha Sheth. She was already a pioneer in her field and had been researching Indian skin for the past 30 years. Her father, Dr. Sharat Desai, was also a renowned doctor who had started the first dermatology department in India, at KEM hospital.

Through the course of her career, Dr. Rekha Sheth found that most dermat studies were done on Caucasian skin. Even as she set up her practice in India, to her frustration, most of the products available in the market were designed for Korean or Caucasian skin. So she took it upon herself to create products which answered concerns that specifically Indian skin had. Indian skin is different. Due to its high melanin content, it tends to pigment a lot easier. Add to it a harsh environment and epidemics — it makes for a unique case. Even to this day, doctors around the world are not trained to deal with skin of color. A lot of the research she did drew back on traditional remedies and verified if there was any science behind them — and then eventually coupled those with western medicine to offer the best solutions for her community.

Armed with all this legacy and research, Dr. Aneesh decided that it was time that this knowledge and product line be shared with the world.

The brief was clear — but not easy. To create a premium, scientifically researched medical brand that was not promising fairness but focussed on the health and concerns of Indian skin.

We knew, that this brand could exist only if we could change the conversation about skin in India.

This was a time when clean beauty brands had not yet made their foray into the Indian market. Fairness was still the primary purpose of skin products in India — it was an era when Priyanka Chopra was still whitened in ads and Yami Gautam was the face of Fair and Lovely.

Melanin as the starting point

On the personal front, I had just come back from studying in London and had seen the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement already surge there. Asian, Hispanic, and dark-skinned models were on billboards everywhere. And even though I was termed as ‘fair-skinned’ in India, I was ochre-brown in London. (I had even started my own comic strip called Indian Girl in London, which I should probably revive)

My skin is many tones darker than the average Londoner — I had become very aware of the contrast of beautiful melanin dripped skin versus the pale white that we were made to chase here in India.

And so, ‘Melanin’ became the starting design point for this brand. In fact, even on a medical level, the behavior of melanin is what makes Indian skin concerns so different from Caucasians.

Indian skin tones are a diaspora in itself. We wanted to address and celebrate this diversity and say “ALL of this is Indian.”

A new conversation about skin

The idea of creating a brand for melanin people was a new direction at that time. Even today there are a handful of brands that actually have the research backing it.

Dr. Sheths was putting up concern posts and stories on their Instagram about a conversation no one was having. And often got flak for it. Even today, ‘skin of color science’ is an issue globally. We need more scientific research and remedies for brown skin types and this will only happen if the focus shifts from fairness to wellness.

The brand rose to prominence quite quickly with 30k instagram followers and sales doubling every year.

It was clear that an under-serviced consumer category was finally being spoken to the way they had always wanted. Their needs, and skincare concerns were no longer bracketed into fairness problems but spoken to from a holistic standpoint.

Models and photography

In our initial photography, even for product shots, we wanted to bring Indian skin in. So an easy way was to introduce hands in many shots. This was an easy, low budget way to continue our melanin story.

We eventually got the budget to do a full fledged photoshoot with actual models. We were so excited! We want to pick the Dr. Sheth Indian Women. The brief was to find models with naturally great skin, confident personalities and of course, varied skin tones. We had to look long and hard to find dusky to dark models, something Dr. Aneesh was very particular about. Another challenge was finding a team from the makeup artists, photographer, lighting crew and touch up artists to not lighten their skin. Its such a deep rooted industry habit that a lot of them didn’t even know. We are glad to have found the right partners.

The new campaign went on to live on their website and social media — all this while we had only been talking, but now we could finally show our customers the beauty of healthy Indian skin, with various tones of melanin.

A dark problem

It’s been a long journey — Dr. Sheth’s was our first client and we are still associated with the brand today. The world has changed since 2016 and so has the indian consumer and the world she lives in.

Growing up, I have seen my dusky sisters suffer the quiet inferiority complex for something they had no control over. No amount of bleaching treatments at salons and sun avoidance was going to make them lose their lovely melanin. And this mentality was present throughout the Indian socio-economic spectrum. From casual insults from neighbors and relatives, to increased dowry prices for dark skinned brides, there have been an array of casualties of this ‘Dark Problem’.

The ‘Me Too’ and ‘Black Lives Matter’ movements have set into motion what social media can do to millennia of unrest. It has brought up dormant social issues and made us question their existence.

In this climate, the optimist in me hopes for the conversation around beauty to evolve. With the growing buzz around self-worth, mental health, and #BLM, the demand for dark skinned models is bound to increase both globally and hence locally in India.

The pessimist in me asks — Can hundreds of years of conditioning through the caste system and the colonial hangover be erased by a few hashtags and trends?

Roshnee Desai is the founder and creative director of LOCAL, a design studio based in India that works on brands that are rooted in the local, affecting the global.