Nivea Pulled This Shocking Deodorant Ad After it Was Adopted by White Supremacists. Clearly No One’s Told Them about Fair & Lovely Yet

By Sharanya Gopinathan

This gross ad, intended for Nivea Middle East, was rightfully met with lots of outrage on social media. The ad, for Nivea Black & White deodorant, features a woman who’s sitting down facing a window, accompanied by the text ‘White is Purity’.

That’s right, it literally says, in exactly those words, that “white is purity”. Unsurprisingly in times like these, the ad was immediately co-opted by alt-right social media users, who found that it fell neatly in line with their white supremacist leanings. The ad has since been pulled down, but not before Twitter really let Nivea have it.

Indian journalist Jaya Sundaresh took to Twitter to express her outrage over the ad, and her tweets remind us that this isn’t a one-off incident, or a marketing strategy limited to the Middle East: companies all over the world profit from colourism, and have been doing so in India with remarkable success, and have been endorsed by major Indian celebrities.
https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849769488614649857

https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849769976034676737

https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849771304773406724

https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849771939254108160

https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849774179461324800

https://twitter.com/jayaist/status/849774758208176129

While also perpetuating racism and the idea that light skin is something to aspire for, many fairness creams also contain compounds that really shouldn’t be put on skin, which is why Ghana banned fairness creams in the country in February 2016.