5. Abhay Deol
The Advertising Standards Council of India attempted to address skin-based discrimination in 2014 by banning ads depicting people with darker skin as inferior, but such products continue to be marketed.
Ads for skin-lightening creams still appear in newspapers, on television and on billboards, featuring Bollywood heartthrobs such as Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone.
In several Facebook posts in April 2017, influential actor Abhay Deol called out several colleagues on social media for endorsing fairness creams, following it up with an opinion piece in the Hindustan Times in which he wrote that “advertising preaches that we would get a better job, a happier marriage, and more beautiful children if we were fair. We are conditioned to believe that life would have been easier had we been born fairer.”